Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman play Larry and Richard, two ambitious young newbies at an insurance company run by bigwig Bernie Lomax (Terry Kiser). After Larry and Richard discover a fraudulent claim on the books, Bernie invites them to spend the weekend at his Long Island beach house, with the secret intention of having his mob buddies off the two honest workers. Instead, the mob kills Bernie, for sleeping with the mobster’s girl amongst other discretions, just as Larry and Richard arrive at his island paradise. Rather than alerting the authorities they decide, for a variety of reasons to annoying to mention, to continue operating under the premise that Bernie is still alive. These two hot shots are so adept at corpse manipulation that no one can tell the difference, not even the mob hitman who now believes he didn’t kill Bernie and has to start from scratch with the whole whacking thing.

I have two questions about WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S:

1) How did it get a green light?
2) What part of it appealed to enough people to give the film a $30 million box office gross earning it enough to success to merit a sequel?

They are equally perplexing. For the life of me, I cannot conceive of a pitch so mesmerizing that it would convince me that a comedy about a dead corpse being lugged around a tropical paradise on Long Island by two halfwits was worth investing my money in. But someone did it. Someone sat in a room, listened to that and said, “YES! I have $10 million dollars and could invest in a film by a cinematic pioneer or even in social programs that could benefit the underprivileged. But something deep within my soul has been stirred by your touching story of fun and sun and floppy cadavers. Let’s do it! Oh and can we cast Andrew McCarthy in it?” It was the 80s, so maybe cocaine played a role.

Let’s not place all the blame on Hollywood here. After all, rather than reject this piece of cinematic flotsam, we as a society said, “YES! We have $7 to spend on a movie, and can imagine no film better than this enticing saga of romance and comedic wonder. 1 for WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S please!” This was the summer of Tim Burton’s BATMAN, Spike Lee’s DO THE RIGHT THING, and Rob Reiner’s WHEN HARRY MET SALLY and you went to see WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S. Even UHF would have been a better choice.

I did a little research online and found that rigor mortis, the process by which a recently dead body stiffens up and becomes immobilized, occurs after three hours and lasts “for around 36 hours.” Days after Bernie goes belly up, he’s flopping around like a wet noodle in a pot of soup. Besides the fact that it’s lazy, it’s a missed comic opportunity. If we’re going to accept that normally functioning adults can’t tell the difference between a warm body and a cold one, then go way off the deep end and have this thing stiffen up and have poor Larry and Richard have to deal with that. Another comedy rule: easily manipulated dead body, not funny. Rigor mortis dead body, hilarious.

Our government is always on the entertainment industry for badly influencing our children, but the list of offensive materials never includes WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S and I believe it should. Because of this war crime of a movie I can never look at a corpse without getting the urge to drink mai tais and wear flip-flops. You wouldn’t believe how bad I am at wakes now because of what BERNIE has done to me. Worst of all, my computer suffered a complete meltdown while it was sitting in my DVD drive. It may not have been directly responsible, but I suspect it played a role. So up yours Bernie, I hate you and hope you die. Well you’re already dead, so remain dead.