Weekend at Bernie's

Weekend at Bernie's is a 1989 American black comedy film directed by Ted Kotcheff and written by Robert Klane. The film stars Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman as young insurance corporation employees who discover that their boss, Bernie, is dead. While attempting to convince people that Bernie is still alive, they discover that Bernie had ordered their deaths to cover up his embezzlement. It grossed $30 million on a $15 million budget. The film's success inspired a sequel, Weekend at Bernie's II (1993).

This article is about the 1989 comedy film. For its 1993 sequel, see Weekend at Bernie's II. For the 2006 album by The Queers, see Weekend at Bernie's (album). For the episode of How I Met Your Mother, see Weekend at Barney's.
Weekend at Bernie's
Video release poster
Directed byTed Kotcheff
Produced byVictor Drai
Written byRobert Klane
Starring
Music byAndy Summers
CinematographyFrançois Protat
Edited byJoan E. Chapman
Production
company
Gladden Entertainment
Distributed by20th Century Fox
Release date
  • July 5, 1989 (1989-07-05)
Running time
97 minutes[1]
CountryWilmington N.C. United States
LanguageEnglish
Budget$15 million[2]
Box office$30.2 million[1]

Plot

Larry Wilson (Andrew McCarthy) and Richard Parker (Jonathan Silverman) are two low-level financial employees at an insurance corporation in New York City. While going over actuarial reports, Richard discovers a series of payments made for the same death. Richard and Larry take their findings to the CEO, Bernie Lomax (Terry Kiser), who commends them for discovering insurance fraud and invites them to his Hamptons, Long Island, beach house for the Labor Day weekend. Unbeknownst to Larry and Richard, Bernie is behind the fraud. Nervously meeting with his mob partner Vito (Louis Giambalvo), Bernie asks to have Larry and Richard killed. However, after Bernie leaves, Vito decides Bernie has been attracting too much attention with his greed and his relationship with Vito's girlfriend, Tina (Catherine Parks), and orders that he be killed instead.

Bernie arrives at the island before Larry and Richard and plans the murders with Paulie (Don Calfa), the hitman, on the phone, unaware the conversation is being recorded on his answering machine. Bernie then plants cash and a fake confession note implicating Larry and Richard in the insurance fraud. Paulie arrives and kills Bernie with a heroin overdose. When Larry and Richard arrive at Bernie's house, they are shocked to find Bernie's body. Before they can call the police, guests arrive for a party that Bernie used to host every weekend. To Larry and Richard's amazement, the guests are too engrossed in their partying to notice he is dead, with the dopey grin from the fatal injection and his sunglasses concealing his lifeless state. Fearing implication in Bernie's death, and wanting to enjoy the luxury of the house for the weekend, Larry proposes he and Richard maintain the illusion that Bernie is still alive, a notion that Richard finds absurd. Only the arrival of Richard's office crush, Gwen Saunders (Catherine Mary Stewart), a summer intern for the company, convinces him to go along with Larry's plan.

Later that night, Tina arrives at the house, and has Larry and Richard direct her to Bernie. There, she also fails to realize he is dead. At that moment, Marty, one of Vito's mobsters witnesses the two of them apparently making love. Fooled into thinking Bernie's assassination failed, he notifies Vito. The next morning, Richard is appalled to discover Larry furthering the illusion of Bernie being alive by manipulating his body's limbs. Richard attempts to call the police but instead activates the phone message detailing Bernie's plot against them. Unaware of the circumstances of Bernie's death, they mistakenly believe they are still the targets of a mob hit and decide to use Bernie's corpse as a prop for protection. Richard and Larry make various attempts to leave the island. All attempts are thwarted, as they repeatedly misplace and recover Bernie's body. Finally, Larry and Richard are forced to return to Bernie's home. Meanwhile, Paulie, unhinged by his apparent failure to kill Bernie, returns to the island.

At the house, Gwen confronts Larry and Richard, who confess that Bernie has been dead since before their arrival. Paulie then appears and opens fire at Bernie, then turns his attention to Larry, Richard, and Gwen. Chasing after the trio, Paulie corners Larry, who clumsily manages to subdue him with a phone cord and a punch. The police eventually arrive and place Paulie under arrest, taking him away in a straitjacket as he continues to insist Bernie is still alive. Bernie is loaded into an ambulance, however, his gurney rolls away and topples off the boardwalk, dumping him onto the beach right behind Richard, Larry, and Gwen, who run away after noticing him. Eventually, a young boy comes along and starts scooping buckets of sand over the body, burying Bernie.

Cast

Reception

On Rotten Tomatoes, it holds a 54% approval rating based on 24 reviews. The website's consensus reads, "Weekend at Bernie's wrings a surprising amount of laughs out of its corpse-driven slapstick premise, but one joke can only carry a film so far."[3] On Metacritic it has a score of 32 out of 100 based on reviews from 5 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".[4] Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade of "B" on scale of A+ to F.[5]

Peter Travers of Rolling Stone called the film "tasteless" and "crude" and felt that in the end it was impossible to "drag one tired joke around for nearly two hours. Like Bernie, the movie ends up dead on its feet."[6] Roger Ebert echoed this sentiment, arguing that movies centered on dead bodies are rarely funny. Ebert gave the film 1 out of 4 stars overall.[7]

The film grossed US$30 million at the box office, and was profitable on home video.[8][9]

Soundtrack

The film's closing credits feature the song "Hot and Cold", performed by American singer Jermaine Stewart. It was written by Andy Summers and Winston "Pipe" Matthews, and produced by Richard Rudolph and Michael Sembello.[10] The song was released as a single by Arista in the United States during June 1989 to promote the film.[11][12]

Lawsuit

On January 24, 2014, director Ted Kotcheff and screenwriter Robert Klane filed a lawsuit against Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and 20th Century Fox for breach of contract for profits they claimed were due from the film.[13][14][15]

The film is quoted and referred to in the TV series How I Met Your Mother, during which characters try to comically reenact the plot of the film.[16]

The movie is revealed to be Rachel Green's (played by Jennifer Aniston) secret favorite in season 4, episode 12 of the TV series Friends, titled "The One with the Embryos".[17]

In season 6, episode 12 of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, Dennis Reynolds attempts to quietly remove what appears to be a deceased patient from a hospital room by slapping dark sunglasses on him and rolling him out in a wheelchair. The scheme, intended to free up a room for his sister Dee who is in the early stages of labor, is soon revealed to have been inspired by the film.

"Weekend at Benson's", an episode of Regular Show in which the main characters, Mordecai and Rigby, take their unconscious boss Benson to a party, is a direct reference to the movie.

The movie's poster is one of many featured on the walls of Jake English in the webcomic Homestuck.[18] The webcomic itself also contains several unrelated gags involving the use of stuffed bodies, but likely drawing inspiration from Weekend at Bernie's.

The Murdoch Mysteries series season 10, episode 8 "Weekend at Murdoch's" has Crabtree, Higgins and Murdoch "reanimating" Roger Newsom with a specially rigged wheelchair to catch a killer.

A cardboard cutout of Bernie was placed behind home plate during an otherwise empty-stadium Kansas City Royals game in August 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic-affected season.[19]

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gollark: Also that.
gollark: Macron uses all of proc, fn, fun, func, def, define and procedure.
gollark: I never had issues except for the times kernel updates anomalously broke the screen somehow and also calibre randomly imploded.
gollark: It sounds like Arch is more stablererer than Debian.

See also

References
  1. "Weekend at Bernie's". Box Office Mojo. Retrieved March 18, 2020.
  2. "Box Office Information for Weekend at Bernie's". Archived from the original on February 22, 2014. Retrieved April 4, 2013.
  3. Weekend at Bernie's at Rotten Tomatoes
  4. "Weekend at Bernie's". Metacritic.
  5. "Cinemascore". CinemaScore. Archived from the original on 2018-12-20.
  6. "Weekend at Bernie's". Rolling Stone. Retrieved 2015-12-26.
  7. Ebert, Roger. "Weekend at Bernie's Movie Review (1989)". www.rogerebert.com. Retrieved 2015-12-26.
  8. Johnson, Steve (Jul 13, 1993). "Resurrection 'Weekend at Bernie's II' Feels More Like a Month". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved 2014-10-29.
  9. "Familiarity Breeds Film Hits". Daily News of Los Angeles. Jul 13, 1993. Retrieved 2009-09-01.
  10. Hot and Cold (Media notes). Jermaine Stewart. Arista Records. 1989. AS1-9848.CS1 maint: others (link) Retrieved 24 May 2018.
  11. "Jermaine Stewart - Hot And Cold / Search For Love - Arista - USA - AS1-9848". 45cat. 2016-01-11. Retrieved 2018-05-24.
  12. "The Motion Picture Guide 1990 Annual: The Films of 1989 - Google Books". Books.google.co.uk. 2008-07-31. Retrieved 2018-05-24.
  13. Patten, Dominic (24 January 2014). "Fox & MGM Sued In Multimillion-Dollar 'Weekend At Bernie's' Profits Suit". Deadline Hollywood. Retrieved 30 March 2015.
  14. McNary, Dave (24 January 2014). "'Weekend at Bernie's' Filmmakers Sue Fox, MGM Over Profits". Variety. Retrieved 2 April 2015.
  15. Lowrey, Brandon (15 October 2014). "MGM Tries To Kill 'Weekend At Bernie's' Contract Claims". Retrieved 2 April 2015.
  16. Vitcavage, Adam (February 25, 2013). "How I Met Your Mother Review: "Weekend at Barney's" (Episode 8.18)". pastemagazine.com. Retrieved January 24, 2020.
  17. "Transcript of Friends Episode 4.12 The One With The Embryos". Retrieved January 24, 2020.
  18. Hussie, Andrew (November 19, 2011). "Jake: Stop kissing stupid poster". homestuck.com. Retrieved June 5, 2020.
  19. https://www.newsweek.com/weekend-bernies-cardboard-cutout-kansas-city-royals-1523617
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