Weekend at Bernie’s (1989)

(On Cable TV, December 2018) There’s dumb comedies, and then there’s Weekend at Bernie’s, a film that somehow thought it would be a fine premise to have a corpse carried around and made as if it was still alive. The amount of sheer suspension of disbelief required to buy into this inane concept would power the current American presidency for about ten minutes, but that’s how Hollywood rolls. Focusing on a pair of your men as protagonists allows the film to dip deep into the dumb-guy humour pool, with beaches and bikinis and necrophilia, with a bit of yuppie self-absorption to round things off. It’s remarkably dumb for a black comedy, and oddly insubstantial as well—once the script has gone through the obvious jokes, there’s not a lot left to do for director Ted Kotcheff. I suppose that the audacity has its charm … and that Weekend at Bernie’s must be seen at least once to be believed. (The sequel is even worse.)