As kid I had a steady stream of movies that I watched over and over. Outside of the obvious big franchise films I loved, Summer School, Meatballs, Last Dragon, Porky’s, Revenge of the Nerds and One Crazy Summer were regular watches. In 1985 One Crazy Summer director Savage Steve Holland teamed up with John Cusak for the first time for Better Off Dead co-starring David Ogden Stiers, Diane Franklin, Kim Darby, Yuji Okumoto, Curtis Armstrong, Dan Schneider, and Chuck Mitchell. Now the film is getting the 4K treatment for the first time ever.

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Better Off Dead follows Lane who decides that suicide is the answer after his girlfriend ditches him for a boorish ski jock. However, his increasingly inept attempts bring him only more agony, not to mention embarrassment.

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This was yet another of those films that I watched often probably more for the insane cooking moments from Lane’s mom played hilariously brilliant by Kim Darby and the running paperboy gag that gets more ridiculous as the film goes along. I haven’t sat down and watched the film in years so was excited to revisit some of my childhood and see if I had as much fun with it as I did back then.

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The film takes a silly approach to dealing with suicide which probably wouldn’t hold up today, like most films of the 80s, but is still light enough to entertain. There is a silly overlay to the entire film that mixes the typical 80s teen comedy with the goofy almost parody styles. For whatever reason it still works no matter how many strange things are going on in the background whether it be tentacles in the soup or a singing hamburger it still entertains just as I remember it and had me smiling ear to ear.

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