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What kind of a host invites you to his house for the weekend and dies on you?

Despite its status as a benchmark of late 80s pop culture, the film Weekend at Bernie's sounds like it should never have been greenlit. Two lowly young insurance employees find their boss dead of an apparent overdose at his beach house--and pretend he is still alive. The mafia boss who ordered Bernie's death sends the enforcer back to kill him again and again, and there's a love interest who has to be kept in the dark. Many shenanigans ensue. The storytelling is bonkers, the biology is suspect, and although the physical comedy is top-notch, the humor is remarkably juvenile.

Honestly, Weekend at Bernie's shouldn't work. But this stupid comedy is not only genuinely funny, but it gave us a pop culture shorthand we're still using nearly 40 years later. This is partially thanks to the chemistry and amazing physicality of the three lead actors who sold us on the idea that Bernie's death was a funny situation rather than a mental health nightmare. The film is still a pop culture product of its time, including the misogyny and homophobia that was par for the course in the 1980s, but it still offers more laughs than you'd expect from a one-joke movie.

Throw on your headphones and sunglasses, relax in a sun lounger, and take a listen! Just make sure you move every once in a while.

Mentioned in this episode:

Roger Ebert’s review of Weekend at Bernie’s

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are the sister podcasters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our extended family as the Guy Girls.

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love 80s and 90s movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, analyzing film tropes with a side of feminism, and examining the pop culture of our Gen X childhood for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, religious allegory, and whatever else we find.

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