Heathers

Those were the days! Heathers
In a burst of nostalgia I watched Michael Lehmann's 'Heathers' again. A 1988 black comedy that I remembered fondly, it features Christian Slater doing his finest Jack Nicholson impression and Winona Ryder back when you could be mistaken for thinking her cool. The pair get involved in killing high school 'popular' people and masking their crimes as suicides. But can you really get rid of adolescent headaches just by killing them?
There's actually a lot going on beneath the shock value - issues of responsibility and the moral approach to society (this is the 'high school that is society' Slater claims at one point) - and in light of what came after with Columbine and other teenage massacres, it is tempting to read even more into it. However, this might be a mistake; it is as much a satire on the many high school movies that peppered the 80s as it is a forecast of things to come. And it is very 80s!
On rewatching it's not nearly as slickly directed as I thought it was then. It's also not nearly as immediate, but then I was a teenager when I first watched it and it held a lot of resonances for me at that age. Now it works, but lacks that heart-tugging urgency. Having said that, that says as much about the society we have become as the person I've grown into.
Well worth revisiting if you never saw it first time around.