I'd Be Better Off Dead (Then to Live Without You)

Classic. Simply classic. Great 80's movies are measured by their cheesiness, their quotability, the entertaining quirky characters and most of all, their relevance to the plight of the nerdy teenager. There are few movies that score high in all of these categories but Better Off Dead meets the mark. First off, Savage Steve Holland's tale of frustrated teenage compulsion has all the ingredients of the classic 80's comedy: everyman teen loser with a wastoid for a best friend, cheesy blonde bad guy with an army of cheesy henchmen (with the even cheesier bad guy name of Roy Stalin), goofy neighbors, oblivious parents desperate to connect, a fair weather prom queen girlfriend, and a pretty girl next door who is the only person who manages to see our hero's best qualities.

First there's Lane Myer (John Cusack) a throwaway boyfriend who gets cut from the ski team by Captain Roy Stalin and then promptly loses his girlfriend Beth to the blond ski heartthrob (who also plays acoustic guitar and woos babes in the school cafeteria). Lane thinks he can't go on so he devises several creative ways to kill himself but never comes anywhere close to pulling it off, unless he's trying to ski the infamous K-12 to impress some girl.

Then there's his best friend Charles DeMar (played by Booger from Revenge of the Nerds) who spends math class staring at a pickled fetus that he carries around in a jar. Charles is frustrated that he can't find real drugs in his town so he spends his time sniffing snow - pure snow - so much that he freezes the left side of his brain and can no longer move his right arm. Awesome.

Ricky is the next-door neighbor (Blunden from Head of the Class. Remember? The fat guy with the computer?). Ricky's mom has invited a foreign-exchange student into their home, pretty little Monique, who has a killer fastball and doesn't know that the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to LA in 1958.

And who can forget the two Asian guys that keep showing up at stoplights to challenge Lane to drag races in his 76 Camaro across suburbian Main Street? Lane would do just fine against these guys if it weren't for Porky - that's right Porky from Porky's, as the proprietor of the local grease kettle restaurant Pig Burger, where Lane works and finds himself in the middle of a fantasy clay-mation sequence powered by Van Halen's "Everybody Wants Some."

If you're not logging into Netflix by now and adding this movie to your queue then you're better off dead and you can forget about watching such favorites as Weird Science, Fletch, Sixteen Candles, One Crazy Summer and Teen Wolf - all of which meet the above qualifications as the classic 80's comedy.

In the end, Lane beats Stalin in a one on one race down the deadly K-12, serenades Monique with his saxophone during a private candlelight dinner and Pig Burger and defeats fat Ricky in a ski pole duel that rivals Darth Maul vs. Obi-Wan in The Phantom Menace. When Beth dumps Roy and tries to take Lane back, our hero pushes her out of the way and runs away with Monique to live happily ever after. Now what could be better than that?

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