Tuesday, April 23, 2019

Larry Wilson And His Weekends With Bernie: A Profile In Psychopathy

Much to the chagrin of my friends, loved ones, and random passersby who happen to be in earshot while I'm recalling the franchise, both Weekend at Bernie's films have been part of my lexicon for as long as I can remember. Weekend at Bernie's (1989) and Weekend at Bernie's II (1993) tell the story of Richard Parker (Jonathan Silverman) and Larry Wilson (Andrew McCarthy), two young professionals who stumble into the complicated affairs of their boss, Bernie Lomax (Terry Kiser). 

While the story starts off as a reasonably amusing romp about two scamps and their dreams of endless spring breaking, it quickly takes the darkest of turns when Larry (one of the most casually sinister and calculating characters in film history) decides to capitalize on Bernie's demise. After pointing out to Bernie earlier in the film that someone in their company has been embezzling money through fraudulent insurance policies, Richard and Larry discover Bernie's been murdered upon arriving at his vacation home in the Hamptons. 

Determined not to let their opportunity for luxuriation pass by, Larry convinces himself and, even more disturbingly, his best friend Richard, to desecrate the corpse in hopes of fooling Bernie's other numerous weekend guests into believing that their host and benefactor is still alive. After all, it's worth it because Larry "needs to get laid" and reporting a murder will result in paperwork, effectively torpedoing the boys' weekend getaway.

Ladies and gentlemen, I implore you to look into the face of one Larry Wilson, the true villain of the Weekend at Bernie's franchise:


e.g. One evil son of a bitch.

Before I step back into the ninth circle of Hell with Larry, allow me to offer some context for my relationship with these films. As I stated up top, both movies are among some of my earliest cinematic memories. I saw Weekend at Bernie's 2 (or W@B2, if you'll indulge the abbreviation) first and repeatedly thanks to reruns of it all over basic cable when I was young. I didn't see the first Weekend at Bernie's (W@B) until one New Year's Eve when I rented it on VHS along with the original Spawn film. I didn't realize it at the time, but despite having a murderous shape-shifting clown and Satan as villains, Spawn still has a more optimistic view of the human condition than Weekend at Bernie's.

I came to appreciate and enjoy the first film more than the second given its simpler premise and darkly effective slapstick humor. Both movies rely on the audience's acceptance of a dead body being subjected to increasingly shocking and disrespectful scenarios for the benefit of the two hapless protagonists. I still laugh at a lot of the stuff in these movies and I will always adore Bernie's now (somewhat) famous dance moves in W@B2, but my recent re-watch of both forced me to confront the psychotic nature of Larry and how he uses his mania to manipulate Richard into committing some very serious crimes:



Ted Kotcheff, who directed one of the best action dramas of all time, First Blood (1982), stepped up to direct Weekend at Bernie's in 1989 because, you know, that makes sense. What both First Blood and Weekend at Bernie's have in common is their unyielding gaze into mortality, but they part ways on how much weight that carries. W@B endures in pop culture due to nostalgia and countless references in movies and TV shows. How I Met Your Mother, The Simpsons, Will and Grace, The Office, and many others have referred back to, and, in some cases, fully parodied the events of the first film. 

While not quite a bonafide universal classic, W@B has its audience (including me, I own both movies), so let me be clear: Taking these films too seriously is not the point of this article. Instead, as someone who enjoys this franchise for what it is, I'm reconciling the assumption the writer, Robert Klane, made about his audience in the late 80s and early 90s. Back then, tasteless humor wasn't played up for irony as much as it is in modern cinema. While both movies are certainly self aware, they earnestly bank on the audience rooting for a horny con artist and his put upon, straight-laced pal. Yes, they may be committing multiple crimes including but not limited to the wholly unnecessary cover-up of a murder they didn't commit and the subsequent misuse and abuse of the deceased's body, but there's constant steel drum music playing, how wacky!


A paragon of virtue in the late 1980s

It's easy to imagine a version of this made in 2019 that focuses more heavily on the moral repercussions of tossing around a corpse for kicks, so I appreciate how unencumbered the comedy is as a result. Even so, Klane attempts to ease the audience's guilt at enjoying the macabre just a bit more by revealing that in life, Bernie intended to have Richard and Larry murdered because the  embezzlement they discovered was actually being committed by Bernie himself. Bernie gets offed instead because the mobsters he attempted to hire for the job find him too unpredictable as a business partner. Oh, and Bernie was sleeping with the mob boss's wife.

And the mob boss's name? Vito. Yep.

But you know what? The boys didn't know Bernie was a bad dude when they found his body. As far as they're concerned, he was their awesome boss who invited them to his huge house for a weekend of partying so he could discuss promoting them. Even with that mindset, Larry wastes no time deciding that they shouldn't call the police but instead "honor" Bernie's wishes by keeping the party going. Richard ultimately agrees because Gwen, Richard's love interest, happens to be visiting the Hamptons that weekend as well.

Richard has questionable morality, no doubt. He struggles with his decisions throughout both movies, but ultimately caves into Larry's way of thinking every time because Larry is the Alpha in this situation. Larry's a turd on wheels, to be sure, but he's also assertive. And psychotic. Bernie may have ordered their execution, but Larry goes from fun-loving (presumed) Lothario, to cadaver puppetry enthusiast on the drop of a dime.

 Someone's prepared his whole life for this.

If the the first movie was all we ever got, I wonder how much more or less it would have been regarded. Weekend at Bernie's did quite well grossing over $30 million on a $15 million budget. That's some solid yuppie-era scratch. Given its simple plot and setting, a sequel didn't need to be terribly complicated and yet it took four years for Robert Klane to draft, produce, and ultimately direct Weekend at Bernie's II.

By 1993, the appetite for Bernie hosting more weekends had certainly waned. The sequel managed to amass over $12 million on a $7 million budget, but that minor feat wasn't enough to keep the series afloat. W@B2's bananas premise also couldn't have helped with the marketing.

In the sequel, Richard and Larry decide to again abduct Bernie's corpse, this time directly from the NYC morgue.

That's a serious crime.

This movie goes all in on not caring about beating the shit out of a corpse for comedic effect. While the first had some funny gags featuring Bernie smacking into walls, falling off ledges, and slamming into a series of buoys, W@B2 kicks things off with Larry stomping Bernie's corpse into a suitcase so that he and Richard can use Bernie's identity to access a safety deposit box in the Virgin Islands that may or may not contain the cash from Bernie's embezzlement scheme in the first film.

They manage to successfully smuggle Bernie's body into St. Thomas where they check into a luxury hotel and transfer Bernie into the mini-fridge by mercilessly kicking him until he fits. Even though it was their idea to implement this scheme, Larry and Richard seem severely inconvenienced by hauling Bernie's now decaying body across international waters. Bernie has the audacity to smell like rot, so they spray him with deodorant and hope for the best. Once safely stowed in the fridge, Larry decides it's time to hit the island and live the high life he knows he deserves!

Oh yeah, Bernie's a dancing voodoo zombie in this one.

That's right. I failed to mention that Larry and Richard are completely unaware that Bernie's been partially reanimated by dime store voodoo. As a result, Bernie walk-dances towards an unseen treasure whenever music is playing nearby. Some criminals caught wind of Bernie's supposed hidden dough and figured the most practical method of tracking it down was hiring some voodoo magicians. That makes sense.

Despite this interesting magic wrinkle, the film tends to repeat a lot of gags from the first movie and ups the ante on others. Critics have never been kind to it, and I understand why. This sequel is contrived, ridiculous, offensive, and unabashedly dumb. I also love re-watching it.

Terry Kiser who plays Bernie somehow manages to be the underrated player in this franchise. Despite being a dead man, Kiser nails aspects of physical comedy that have been a rarity since the silent era of cinema. In the first film, Kiser excels in the role with an effortless malleability that begs one to question how the filmmakers pulled off some of the stunts. A mannequin was used for major action shots in both films, but Kiser gets plenty of close-ups and really shines in Part 2 with his trademark dancing.

Kiser has to continuously find ways to dance himself out of one situation and arrive in another, the whole time maintaining his unflappable smirk. This culminates in a rather astonishing underwater sequence in which Bernie march-dances to his treasure on the ocean floor while Larry and Richard pursue him in scuba gear. The coordination and photography in that sequence really stand out, so I wanted to give the filmmakers their due.

Well done.

The dancing leads to some amusing and at times hilarious situations, but there is a laser focus on punishing Bernie's corpse as much as possible. In addition to getting stomped into a suitcase and mini-fridge, Bernie also gets punched in the face, receives numerous blows to the head and groin, is bitten by a shark while snagged to a flyaway para-sail, shot through the head with a harpoon, and is finally mounted to a carriage intended for horses and directed by Larry who cackles with delight at his own ingenious plan to use Bernie as a means of transportation.

Larry and Richard ultimately emerge from this insane situation relatively unscathed and experience little to no repercussions for their horrendous crimes.

You know who does pay? Barry Bostwick.

Dammit, Bernie, I love you!

Bostwick has a thankless villain role in W@B2. He follows and photographs Larry and Richard throughout their travels in hopes of exposing their involvement in Bernie's scheme. In this movie, Bostwick is doing his job and that should be a good thing. He wants to catch these criminals red-handed but every time he gets close, he's somehow implicated in the crimes himself and ultimately deemed insane for claiming he keeps seeing the deceased Bernie Lomax dancing around St. Thomas.

In essence, Bostwick pays for the crimes of Larry and Richard. Larry almost redeems himself (somewhat) when the blood of a virgin is required to save Richard from voodoo poison. Instead of Larry's virginity garnering sympathy from the audience, it shines a light on his pathological behavior up until this point in the second movie. His desperation for sex, status, money, and limitless pleasure is glaringly obvious long before they pull the virgin blood gag which was very popular in 1993.

Weekend at Bernie's II and Hocus Pocus released on July 9 and July 16, 1993, respectively, so moviegoers who happened to see both that year must have marveled at how much better Hocus Pocus used that joke to service the story:



Larry also overcompensates for his now exposed virginity by buying a yacht staffed with scantily clad women. How does he swing this, you ask? Well, Bernie did end up dancing all the way to $3 million in a treasure chest on the bottom of the ocean. Because the authorities were only looking for a reported $2 million, Larry skims a cool mill off the top for himself and clears his conscience by paying the $8K of bills he's racked up on Bernie's credit card during this entire morbid affair.

Let me be clear: Larry is a sick and dangerous person. I argue that he's psychotic because he's calculating, unfeeling, and at times euphoric while traipsing Bernie's dead body up and down the eastern seaboard. And at the end of it all, karma rewards him with a million bucks.

What the hell?

Despite my criticisms, I still laugh at these movies. They're not all-time greats by any stretch, but they remain fascinating installments in comedic film history. There are almost innumerable examples of dead bodies being used for humor in film and television. A more recent example of such a film would be Swiss Army Man (2016), a bizarre but sincere comedy about a lonely man befriending a flatulent corpse. I didn't love this film, but I enjoyed it and appreciated its big swings. It also treated the corpse in that film with a bit more humanity.

I suppose I'm conditioned like many others to be more sensitive to questionable morality in cinema when I revisit older films. It's not that I'm shocked or remotely offended by Weekend at Bernie's, but rather that I'm fascinated with where we were as a film audience when these films released. I also just find them to be delightfully bizarre and Terry Kiser's physical comedy is top notch.

I think Weekend at Bernie's could be remade as a more thoughtful comedy today while still raising the bar on the dark slapstick humor. I'll always be happy to revisit the originals with a matching Bernie smirk on my face, but I'll do it with a watchful eye fixed on Larry Wilson because he's one shifty and dangerous son of a bitch.

Somewhere beyond the sea,
Somewhere waiting for me

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