Dead and loving it
How do you make a sequel to a black comedy about a dead body posing as a living man? It’s obvious, isn’t it? You take the story to its next logical step: You enchant the corpse with voodoo magic that makes it dance, fly it to a tropical island, and send it on an underwater treasure hunt. Tale as old as time.
My position is that the original Weekend at Bernie’s is a deeply underrated satire, a funny and sharply executed comedy. And my follow-up position is that Weekend at Bernie’s II… is a motion picture!
A large percentage of what I admired about the original film is abandoned in the sequel. But what’s striking is that, in spite of the ludicrous logline and the predictable step down in charm, this is not one of those sequels that feels completely out of step with the original. It looks about the same (despite a new director and cinematographer), and it has the same three leads. Weekend at Bernie’s writer, Robert Klane, not only pens the sequel to preserve the original’s spirit, but also steps in as director, replacing Ted Kotcheff’s formidable work. As such, you might even make the case that this is the unfiltered, auteur take on the Weekend at Bernie’s project, a deranged but pure distillation of Klane’s grand vision. I don’t think I would make that case, but, hey, you could.
The film opens with an animated credits sequence in which Larry Wilson (Andrew McCarthy) and Richard Parker (Jonathan Silverman) chase an ambulance that keeps disgorging Bernie Lomax (Terry Kiser) onto the pavement, then goes rooting through the first movie for loose threads. It finds two million of them, as Bernie’s didn’t exactly end with lots of closure. The main one is that money Bernie embezzled was never recovered, so the insurance company would like it back. The firm’s internal investigator, Arthur Hummel (Barry Bostwick), gets two weeks to prove the boys were in on the scheme and the murder, which is a thoroughly reasonable assumption once you start thinking about how the sequence of events in the first film would be perceived from the outside. Meanwhile, a Virgin Islands voodoo queen named Mobu (Novella Nelson) dispatches two goons to New York to reanimate the body so Bernie can lead them to the cash. Unfortunately, they botch the revival ritual in the bathroom of a porno theater: the sacrificial chicken escapes, so a street pigeon gets conscripted. As such Bernie comes back wrong: He moves, but only when music is playing.
If nothing else, one must admire Weekend at Bernie’s II for giving Kiser a much broader canvas to work in executing physical comedy as a partially reanimated corpse. This time around, he doesn’t just plop around with heft and comic timing as Bernie’s body as in Part 1; instead, he shuffles, bobs, and grinds toward buried treasure whenever a boombox kicks on. It’s funny every time, or maybe my brain was just melting out my ears. Bernie dances out of a suitcase he’s been crammed inside. He mambos in the background of shots of other people’s conversations. He gets snarled in a parasail harness and flies through the air. And the film constantly escalates into more inventive scenarios so it never risks feeling too same-ish. Some of the footage, like Bernie dancing underwater, I genuinely don’t know how they shot.
But I should not get carried away and miss the main point, which is that this movie has absolutely none of the savvy touch that made the first so incisive or charming, even human. It does not depict a scenario of Larry and Richard fumbling into a death and trying to make sense of it and the entire culture’s hedonism tied into that death. Here they, and multiple other parties, are knowingly maneuvering and mutilating a corpse for their own benefit, and that feels a little icky, or at least it would if the movie put on any satirical pretense this time around. It’s a colder, more cynical approach to the central gimmick; but then am I really going to try and scold a movie with this premise for tastelessness? Surely anyone pressing play on a movie called Weekend at Bernie’s II knew what they were getting into. (I won’t even bother explaining the ways in which a movie from the early ’90s depicting “voodoo” is problematic, because you probably can guess that, too.)
The reason I almost recommend this film is that the last twenty minutes are legitimately packed with fun, over-the-top set pieces and provocations. Bernie takes a speargun through the skull and spends the rest of the movie dancing around with an arrow through his noggin. The next scene, Larry lashes him to the reins of a horse-drawn tour carriage and cranks the tunes so that Bernie’s groovy moves pull the whole rig careening downhill at a speed nobody can control, conveniently straight into the voodoo hideout for a climax of the wackiest hi-jinks. Better for a loopy movie to save its biggest loops for the end, and this one has some corkers.
Unfortunately, I can’t get all the way there: The bits are intermittently fun, but the picture as a whole is a bit too much spaghetti and not enough wall-stickage. It’s textbook diminishing returns. And yet the vibes are good: Bernie’s dead bones end the movie dancing into the sunset through a town carnival, accompanied by the movie’s villains who have been transformed into goats. It’s just a picture perfect image of silliness. Cheers to Klane and the team for making this happen.
And you can’t say Weekend at Bernie’s II had no cultural impact: years later, rappers were pulling moves from the film for novelty tracks, and by the early 2010s the Saints defense was doing the Bernie on the field and the A’s were giving away Bernie Lean bobbleheads. I hope Kiser gets royalties.
Is It Good?
Nearly Good (4/8)
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Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.