Weekend at Bernie's (1989)

There are days you wish you could sit on pitch meetings. Can you imagine the pitch for 1989’s Weekend at Bernie’s? It’s such an absurd plot that nothing about it should work, but somehow all of it works. It might be the most 80s comedy ever made. Andrew McCarthy, Jonathan Silverman, the luminous Catherine Mary Stewart are fantastic. And Terry Kiser as Bernie is masterful as the corpse. It’s slapstick, it’s unbelievable only-in-a-movie circumstances, it’s impossibility all in one. Movies ask you to suspend disbelief for them to work, and Weekend at Bernie’s really needs you to do some heavy lifting in that department. Once you do, it’s a great time. It was a decent hit, but its impact on the culture was bigger. The movie was the subject of many late-night TV jokes, and that helped drive it to more success on HBO. It spawned an even more unlikely sequel, because how long could Bernie’s corpse go without decomposing? As you might imagine, critics of 1989 didn’t care for it. But it’s a critic-proof movie. If you are looking for something you don’t want to think about and just watch to get your mind off the world for a moment, spend the weekend with Bernie.