WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S – I have many fond memories of this film because I’ve seen it so many times. In fact, one summer I convinced a bunch of Harvard students to come to a double feature screening of both of these movies. They all fell asleep. Smart people are stupid sometimes. Anyway, it’s my favorite one-joke comedy picture of all time, mostly because the joke is completely tasteless and only entertains because at no point is it ever actually funny. It’s the genuinely rare “so bad it’s good” comedy, something hard to achieve because bad jokes are usually just that. And this movie, if watched multiple times, will make you laugh out loud by the fourth or fifth viewing. That may be a result of madness, I don’t know. The best performance in the picture comes from Terry Kiser. He plays the dead guy, and really looks dead the whole time, but has a wonderfully odd look on his face that never changes. He should have received an Oscar, but they don’t give those things for comedy performances, excepting the dumb guy from that fish movie that the British guy did. That dumb guy performance was amazing…but Kiser’s performance is more so. Really. And the guy doesn’t work very much. It’s bullshit. In any event, in between dead guy jokes, there are a lot of chicks in bikinis. It’s a PG-13 picture, so those suits don’t come off, but that’s okay because PG-13 is family friendly and therefore you can watch this movie about two assholes who pretend a dead guy is alive so they can get laid with your family. Nice!

WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S PART II – This one picks up where the other one left off. Well, after a really bad animated opening credit sequence. The two idiots from the first one need to pretend Bernie is still alive again so they can get some treasure or something. Which I think they want so they can get laid. And they go to some island. And these racist stereotypes cast a spell on Bernie with some stereotypically racist voodoo nonsense so he will reanimate and lead them to the treasure but they lose their live chicken and use fried chicken instead and Bernie only reanimates when music is playing. Kiser is once again amazing, the added physicality of a dancing dead guy absolutely sublime and probably the only genuinely funny thing in the movie. He should have at least gotten a Golden Globe for this one. Again, lots of bikinis between dead guy jokes, no nudity, PG-13 so you can watch in the presence of your children because the  rating makes horribly irresponsible parenting completely socially acceptable. I think there was some kind of chicken-fucking joke at some point that involved one of the actors that blew up in the movie Frankenhooker.