Heathers - B

On Dvd. R-rated, 105 minutes.

"Dear Diary, my teen angst bullsh*t has a body count!" This entry into Veronica's (Winona Ryder) diary gives a pretty tight summary of the mother of all female angst movies. The children of Heathers are Mean Girls, Thirteen, and Clueless.

The film tracks Veronica, recently elevated into the 'cool clique' in her high school (all the other girls are named Heather) and her struggle to deal with the cruelty and shallowness it takes to stay in the group. She is taken with the new guy at school, JD (Christian Slater doing his best brooding), a kid with no parental guidance or love. JD co-opts Veronica into murdering several of the cool kids, including her 'friends.'

The first third of the film is an A. The script is as biting and funny as anything that has come out since (1989). A couple of favorite lines: "Grow up, Heather. Bulimia's so '87!" and "I was impressed to see that she made proper use of the word 'myriad' in her suicide note." The second third is a B, as Veronica and JD start their spree. The last third is a self-parody and is terrible. The film is trying to make light of the way teens are treated and then it tries to ham-handedly show a violent and cheerful ending.

The film is eerily accurate in its depiction of school violence, and shows how Columbine, et al have changed our country. The first scene ends with JD pulling a gun in the cafeteria and shooting 2 other 'cool' teens. It turns out they were just blanks and nobody got hurt, so he only gets a 1 day suspension, and the dialogue of the girls makes light of it. The last scene features JD rigging up dynamite around the school and attempting to blow it up, ultimately blowing himself up. If these kind of images came out in a film today it would be widely condemned and extremely controversial.