Weekend at Bernie's
Hey, Do You Remember...?
Christopher Schrader
4.8 • 676 Ratings
🗓️ 30 June 2017
⏱️ 78 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It's certainly not the most noteworthy comedy from this era, but Weekend at Bernie's managed to stand strong against some pretty fierce competition in the summer of 1989 and its continued success on home video and cable helped cement its reputation as a cult classic. So while our generation tends to regard this film quite fondly, the HDYR gang wasn't super familiar with it. Chris watched it a couple of times as a kid, Carlos had only seen the sequel, and Donna had never seen either of them.
Topics include: Elements introduced in the first ten minutes that the script doesn't follow through on, a first act that's remarkably similar to Ghost, the director's impressive (and diverse) filmography, a lot of love for Terry Kiser's performance (both before and after he kicks the bucket), how they manage to keep us laughing throughout the story's darkest moments, and much much more!
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, do you remember weekend at Bernies? |
| 0:06.6 | Hello and welcome to Hey, do you remember, Hey Do You Remember, a show where we reminisce about a movie or TV series we grew up with, then take off the rose-tinted glasses to see how it holds up. |
| 0:31.7 | I'm Chris. |
| 0:32.4 | I'm Donna. |
| 0:33.2 | And I'm Carlos. |
| 0:33.8 | And today we're revisiting Weekend at Bernice. |
| 0:52.6 | Thank you. I'm Carlos. And today we're revisiting Weekend at Burnies. After uncovering several instances of potential insurance fraud, low-level employees Richard and Larry take their findings to the company's CEO, Bernie Lomax. |
| 1:02.2 | Bernie is so grateful and determined to get to the bottom of this that he invites the boys to spend Labor Day weekend with him at his palatial beach house. |
| 1:09.6 | But once they arrive, they're horrified to discover that their host is dead. |
| 1:14.2 | From there, a tangled web of lies, deceit, double crosses, and murder begins to reveal itself, |
| 1:19.8 | forcing Richard and Larry to improvise increasingly bizarre plans to get off the island and back to safety. |
| 1:26.2 | Weekend at Bernie's faced pretty stiff competition when it was released in the summer |
| 1:34.2 | of 1989. |
| 1:35.7 | It was facing off against heavy hitters like Lethal Weapon 2, Indiana Jones and the Last |
| 1:40.1 | Crusade, Batman, Licensed to Kill, Ghostbusters 2, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, Star Trek 5, |
| 1:46.5 | and it wasn't exactly propped up by glowing reviews either. While some critics found Andrew McCarthy |
| 1:51.6 | and Jonathan Silverman charming enough to carry the film, the majority of them seemed to agree on |
| 1:56.2 | the film's overriding fatal flaw, that it was a one-joke premise more suited to a 10-minute sketch |
| 2:01.8 | than a feature-length film. And yet, the film held its own, grossing double its budget |
| 2:07.5 | at the box office, finding continued success on home video, and eventually earning the reputation |
| 2:12.8 | of a cult classic. So while you can probably point to dozens of better comedies from this era, and even though |
| 2:19.5 | almost everyone involved is typically associated with more iconic work than this, the durability and |
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