Weekend at Bernie's (1989)

I’ll admit right off the bat that this film has very little appeal or merit outside of being something of a quirky cult classic. I happen to enjoy Weekend at Bernie’s though. It takes a plot that has certainly been used before but shakes things up a bit by making the action completely ridiculous and absurd. What it lacks in uniqueness, Weekend at Bernie’s makes up for in physical comedy and sight gags, a nice throw-back to more innocent comedies of yesteryear.

Larry and Richard are lowly accountants for a major New York firm who discover a major accounting error that will save the company a ton of money. Apparently someone set up an insurance policy that would defraud the firm for millions of dollars. They notify the head honcho of the firm who seems happy about the news and invites them to his posh beach house for Memorial Day weekend. The two are stunned and eagerly agree.

Turns out, their boss, Bernie, is the one trying to defraud his company for millions of dollars so he and some of his associates can make some easy money. He tells an associate to come by his beach house Memorial Day weekend and dispatch of the two accountants so that no one ever finds out about the scam. Instead, his associate hires an assassin to kill Bernie as well, due to his getting sloppy in acquiring the money.

Memorial Day weekend arrives and Bernie is killed first, only to be discovered by the two hapless accountants. At first they are dumbfounded and depressed- their weekend is totally shot! Then, Larry decides that they’ll just cover up the death so they can spend the weekend living the high life for a change. This involves many goofy scenarios of rigging up Bernie’s body to a number of contraptions to make him look alive.

It’s all fun and games until Larry and Richard discover that they too are being sought by an assassin and spend the rest of the weekend trying to avoid certain death. This brings on even more hilarity as Bernie’s apparent survival of the assassination frustrates the assassin to keep trying different ways to off the already-dead man. It’s cheek and the blank faced Bernie makes it all the goofier.

Most of the comedy comes from the charade of Bernie being alive. The body undergoes a number of bizarre situations that make it harder for Larry and Richard to keep the act up. But fortunately, just when it seems that everyone is on to them, the people who call themselves Bernie’s friends react as if it’s just crazy old Bernie living it up like he always does. Certainly, it’s not the kind of reaction that would occur in real life, but it’s only meant to be campy, absurd fun. And it is!

While Weekend at Bernie’s would never be deserving of any serious awards, it is a fun little film that gets high marks for both physical and black comedy. How often are you able to laugh at a dead body getting slammed around and manipulated for personal gain? The answer is not very often, which is why Weekend at Bernie’s is a fun little guilty pleasure of a film that will likely be remembered longer than some Oscar winners.

The first half hour or so of the film is completely forgettable, but once the dim-witted accountants hit the beach with a corpse in tow, the movie takes flight. Not quite dumb enough to be considered a “stupid movie,” Weekend at Bernie’s lands squarely in the middle of the pack as a guilty pleasure and is worthy (in my mind at least) of the cult classic following and fondness that it has developed over the years.

RATING: 2.75 out of 5