Weekend at Bernie's (1989) * *

Directed by:  Ted Kotcheff

Starring:  Andrew McCarthy, Jonathan Silverman, Catherine Mary Stewart, Terry Kiser, Catherine Parks, Don Scalfa

Weekend at Bernie's is a one-joke movie which tries its best to sustain that joke for ninety-plus minutes.    However, there are only so many ways you can retell the same gag before it all feels repetitive.    The actors energetically approach the material, and Terry Kiser does very well with what looks easy but isn't; he plays dead.

The plot centers around two guys who discover their boss is dead when they arrive at his beach house for the weekend.    How did Bernie (Kiser) wind up dead?   The guys, Larry (McCarthy) and Richard (Silverman) are analysts at a New York financial firm run by Bernie.    They discover that someone is defrauding the company out of millions and take their findings to Bernie, who of course is the one doing the defrauding.    Bernie invites them up to his house for the weekend while plotting to have them killed and frame them for the fraud.    Bernie's mob friends decide to kill Bernie instead, because he is getting sloppy and he is banging the boss' girl. 

Bernie is offed before Larry and Richard arrive, and instead of calling the police, they decide to pretend Bernie is still alive through contrivances too numerous to mention.    Bernie is bumped around like a rag doll by the guys and people think he's still alive and just very wasted.    Bernie's beach friends are so shallow, they don't realize Bernie is deceased.    Bernie's girl shows up and complicates matters by trying to have sex with him.    The payoff is not what you would expect, falling somewhere between icky and incredulous.

Alas, Weekend at Bernie's is a recycling of the same joke which is amusing at first, but of course grows tiresome.    You would think all of the comic possibilities of this plot would've been exhausted, but four years later, there came Weekend at Bernie's 2, of which I only watched a few minutes.    In that one, the story is supposed to pick up days after the conclusion of this movie, but the four years in between sequels hit the guys pretty hard, and they look considerably older.    Bernie, however, still looks damn good for a guy who has been dead for a week.