It's tempting to view this film as a daring avant-garde experiment. I like to think that the director was trying to see if it was possible to take all the conventions of comedy film and produce something that was completely, utterly, entirely unfunny.
The answer, to judge by "A Weekend at Bernie's II", is a resounding 'Yes'. This may not be the worst film I've ever seen, but my brain seems to have repressed all memory of the others. "Weekend" hovers just on the borderline; bad enough that the thought still causes pain, but not quite so bad that my internal censors have obliterated it from my consciousness.
The plot involves a walking corpse, two protagonists who might just as well be walking corpses, a collection of villains who suffer a succession of 'comic' mishaps, and a pretty girl with nice breasts. There's some voodoo involved, a tropical location, and some money which all the characters (including the dead one) want to get their hands on. It's basically just a weak rehash of the standard hidden money and awkward unwanted object plots (in this case the awkward unwanted object is a dead body that exhibits rather more life than anyone else on the set), and primarily serves as a means to string together a series of slapstick set pieces. The slapstick is both entirely predictable and unfunny, and the humor as a whole seems to be pitched at the low end of the fourteen-year old level (i.e. 'smut lite' and people getting hit in the balls).
It's difficult for me to imagine what the director and the cast thought they were doing when they made this, or why they went ahead and released it once they'd made it. I doubt anyone involved with it earned very much, but surely between them they could have got together enough money to buy up all the prints and have them burned.
This is a movie that has nothing whatsoever to recommend it. It's not even enjoyably bad. It's just a non-movie in which nothing interesting or funny happens. I gave serious thought to walking out, which is not something I often do. If I'd seen it in a cinema, rather than on a long-distance bus doing a steady 60mph through the Mexican desert, I might even have done so...
The answer, to judge by "A Weekend at Bernie's II", is a resounding 'Yes'. This may not be the worst film I've ever seen, but my brain seems to have repressed all memory of the others. "Weekend" hovers just on the borderline; bad enough that the thought still causes pain, but not quite so bad that my internal censors have obliterated it from my consciousness.
The plot involves a walking corpse, two protagonists who might just as well be walking corpses, a collection of villains who suffer a succession of 'comic' mishaps, and a pretty girl with nice breasts. There's some voodoo involved, a tropical location, and some money which all the characters (including the dead one) want to get their hands on. It's basically just a weak rehash of the standard hidden money and awkward unwanted object plots (in this case the awkward unwanted object is a dead body that exhibits rather more life than anyone else on the set), and primarily serves as a means to string together a series of slapstick set pieces. The slapstick is both entirely predictable and unfunny, and the humor as a whole seems to be pitched at the low end of the fourteen-year old level (i.e. 'smut lite' and people getting hit in the balls).
It's difficult for me to imagine what the director and the cast thought they were doing when they made this, or why they went ahead and released it once they'd made it. I doubt anyone involved with it earned very much, but surely between them they could have got together enough money to buy up all the prints and have them burned.
This is a movie that has nothing whatsoever to recommend it. It's not even enjoyably bad. It's just a non-movie in which nothing interesting or funny happens. I gave serious thought to walking out, which is not something I often do. If I'd seen it in a cinema, rather than on a long-distance bus doing a steady 60mph through the Mexican desert, I might even have done so...