I added this to the list because it has so much mindshare and cultural influence even though I thought I probably wouldn’t like it. There was supposed to be a television series based on this film earlier this year but it seems to have been delayed indefinitely due to the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting. After watching this, it’s pretty obvious why its subject matter doesn’t feel like anything to joke about these days.

The three most popular girls at Westerburg High School form a clique and as they are all named Heather, are called the Heathers. Veronica Sawyer is the newest addition to the group but soon sours of them when they use her handwriting forging skills to prank an obese girl. After she hooks up with rebellious new student J.D., they accidentally kill the leader of the  group Heather Chandler by having her drink drain cleaner. Veronica forges a suicide note to avoid being blamed for the death and they are both surprised to discover that it only makes her more popular. The formerly subservient Heather Duke smoothly takes over the role of the school’s queen bee. Later two popular football players spread a rumor about Veronica giving them oral sex. J.D. helps her takes revenge on them, telling her that his gun will only knock them out but it actually kills them. Once again they forge suicide notes, this time insinuating that the two were homosexual lovers. This horrifies Veronica and causes her to try to break up with J.D.

Despite the dark subject matter, this is very much a comedy that in no way attempts to take things seriously. It’s idea of characterisation for Veronica’s parents, for example, is to have them say the same things over and over again. It introduces J.D. by having him prank the two football players by shooting blanks at them with a real gun and not having him being immediately expelled and arrested. At the same time, I don’t find it funny at all, with its attempts being more sad and pathetic than anything else. I don’t think Michael Lehmann is a very good director at all and it has to be remembered that this is the same guy who later went on to direct Hudson Hawk, often cited as among one of the worst films ever made. Every single performer in this film acts poorly and not a single one of the so-called teenagers feel like they belong there.

Yet once again it is not without reason that this film continues to be remembered today. The plot goes in such insane directions that it is genuinely unpredictable. J.D. is the worst personification of adolescent male edginess yet the script does the correct thing in framing him as a deluded, self-important villain and Veronica does eventually turn against him in all earnestness. The script by Daniel Waters probably isn’t as clever as the film thinks as its offered insights into the psychology of teenagers are anything but insightful but it is at least highly original. Of course making fun of violent acts of revenge in school is now completely off limits so it’s hard to see how that television series could ever get made but I’m not sure that it was even that funny back in the 1980s.

Watching this, I also realized what an outlier John Hughes really was as a director of films about teenagers. On some level Heathers is clearly trying to emulate some of the authenticity of a film like The Breakfast Club, released only a few years earlier. Yet it fails on every level as the characters are horrible caricatures of what adults think teenagers are like with no real understanding of or sympathy for how they see themselves. As it stands, watching this is useful to familiarize yourself with a cultural touchstone but I don’t see it as being very worthwhile beyond that.