Heathers (UK Import) (4K UHD Review)
- Review Date: Oct 01, 2024
- Format: 4K Ultra HD
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Director
Michael LehmannRelease Date(s)
1988 (August 5, 2024)Studio(s)
Cinemarque Entertainment/New World Pictures (Arrow Video)- Film/Program Grade: A
- Video Grade: A-
- Audio Grade: B+
- Extras Grade: A
Review
“Dear Diary, my teen-angst bullshit now has a body count.”
During an era in which mass shootings have become increasingly commonplace at universities, colleges, high schools, and even elementary schools, a line like that might seem more like reality than satire. Yet when Daniel Waters wrote those words for Michael Lehmann’s caustic 1988 black comedy Heathers, that kind of reality was still well into the future (even the landmark tragedy of the Columbine massacre was still more than a decade down the road). The Eighties were a time in which Waters could plausibly write a scene where a character brings a gun to school and isn’t even expelled, let alone arrested. Heathers may have been topical in 1988, but not when it came to real-world school violence. No, the true antecedent for Veronica Sawyer’s teen-angst body count was a forgotten film that was already more than a decade in the past at that point: Rene Daalder’s incendiary 1974 classic Massacre at Central High. Consider this basic storyline:
An outsider befriends another student who is a member of one the most popular cliques at high school, one that rules over the rest of the student body through bullying behavior. The outsider slowly starts knocking off the school bullies while successfully covering up the crimes, and that creates a power vacuum that other students exploit. Frustrated at his failure to truly revolutionize high school society, the outsider crafts a plan to plant explosives in the school basement while the students are upstairs in the gymnasium. Only his friend stands between him and mass murder on an unimaginable scale.
Sound familiar? In their broadest narrative strokes, both Heathers and Massacre at Central High cover similar territory. Yet that’s where the resemblances begin and end. Waters has always insisted that he never even saw Massacre at Central High, and he had only read about it in Danny Peary’s classic Cult Movies 2. While that may seem like a bit of a stretch to some people, it should be completely believable to any film fan who lived through that era—many of us could only experience otherwise unavailable films vicariously by reading what Peary had to say about them. It’s just another example of how profoundly influential that Danny Peary has been to generations of film fans and filmmakers.
Besides, whatever similarities that the two storylines may share, the overall tone and intent of each film is radically different. Daalder intended Massacre at Central High as a nuanced political allegory, superficially antifascist, but one where the only thing that separated the oppressor from the oppressed is which one of them was currently wielding the power. Water and Lehmann, on the other hand, took the high school setting of Heathers at face value. It’s broadly satirical, but that satirical lens is focused narrowly on high school sociopolitics rather than on geopolitical allegory. In other words, Heathers really is about teen-angst bullshit, albeit with a blackly comic twist that was derived from Daalder’s more serious take on the material.
Veronica Sawyer (Winona Ryder) is the insider/outsider, a young woman who craves the popularity that belonging to a clique can provide, but is secretly contemptuous of her so-called friends. Those friends are the three other young ladies who comprise the gang colloquially known as the Heathers: Heather Chandler (Kim Walker), Heather McNamara (Lisanne Falk), and Heather Duke (Shannen Doherty). Veronica goes with the flow, but she’s never happy participating in their particularly cruel brand of reindeer games. That flow is interrupted when Veronica becomes smitten with the outsider’s outsider J.D. (Christian Slater). J.D. makes no bones about his open contempt for the Heathers and pretty much everyone else at Westerberg High (outside of Veronica, anyway), so when Veronica lets herself be seduced by the siren call of his countercultural ways, the body count starts to rise:
“I just killed my best friend.”
“And your worst enemy.”
“Same difference.”
While Veronica is a mostly an unwilling participant, J.D. sees a path to better future for everyone. Unfortunately, when they cover up their crimes by faking suicides, that has the inadvertent side effect of turning their unsympathetic victims into sympathetic school heroes. That’s not the better future that J.D. had in mind. One area where Waters and Lehmann did borrow from Daalder was in term of shifting power structures, and when J.D. and Veronica eliminate the most dominant Heather, the previously most submissive one rises to take her place. Nature abhorred a vacuum in Massacre at Central High, and it abhors one in Heathers as well. Yet that’s also where the two films diverge the most significantly. Waters originally envisioned an ending where J.D. succeeds in his plan for a final solution to the school’s problems, but New World Pictures balked at that idea, so he rewrote the conclusion to provide a glimmer of hope.
As a result, the power structure in Heathers shifts one last time, and the new sheriff in town ends up offering a fig leaf to at least one previous recipients of the Heathers’ devious machinations. While Waters was never completely happy with the new ending, it still fits Heathers thematically, and it provides the yin to Massacre at Central High’s yang—especially in light of the way that current events would end up overtaking and even surpassing J.D.’s wildest dreams. While the bomber’s plan in Massacre at Central High also ultimately failed, Daalder offered little hope for a genuinely better future. The catharsis in Heathers may be somewhat pyrrhic, but it’s still a catharsis that has been earned by generations of high school students who have survived the experience and lived to see the dawn (at this point in history, both literally and metaphorically).
How very.
Cinematographer Francis Kenny shot Heathers on 35mm film using Arriflex BL4 cameras with Zeiss high-speed lenses, framed at 1.85:1 for its theatrical release. This version is based on a 4K scan of the original camera negative that was performed at EFilm in Burbank, with digital cleanup and grading handled by Silver Salt restoration in London. High Dynamic Range grades are offered in both Dolby Vision and HDR10. The entire digital restoration was supervised by James White and James Pearcy at Arrow Films (it doesn’t appear that either Michael Lehmann or Francis Kenny were involved).
Kenny’s cinematography for Heathers is highly stylized, with the earlier sequences being given a softer, diffuse look, and then things become more expressionistic as the story progresses—the photography gets darker along with the story. He utilized a variety of film stocks for different circumstances: Kodak 5297 for daytime interiors, Kodak 5247 for daytime exteriors, and Fuji 8514 for nighttime work. Despite the variety of stocks and exposures used, it all cuts together reasonably well. The opening titles and any other optical work throughout the film are naturally even softer than what Kenny intended, but everything else displays as much detail as the stocks, lenses, and filters will allow. The grain does vary a bit from sequence to sequence, but that’s a natural consequence of the different stocks and how they were rated. The Fidelity in Motion encoding handles all of the varying grain with no issues, and there’s also no significant damage visible anywhere. The grading offers richly saturated colors, with primaries like the reds, greens, and blues looking particularly dense. It all seems to match Kenny’s stylized intentions perfectly.
Audio is offered in English 1.0 mono LPCM, 2.0 stereo LPCM, and 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio, with optional English subtitles. Heathers was released theatrically in mono, but David Newman’s score was recorded in stereo, and that seems to be the primary difference between all three versions. If there are encoded surrounds on the 2.0 track, they’re minimal at best, and the 5.1 track sounds similar. The mono track sounds a bit more compressed than the others do, but the pithy dialogue is still perfectly clear. The choice is yours, but the music alone arguably gives the 2.0 and the 5.1 an edge.
Arrow’s Region-Free Limited Edition 4K Ultra HD release of Heathers is UHD only—there’s no Blu-ray offered in the package. The insert is reversible, featuring new artwork by Robert Sammelin on one side and the original theatrical poster artwork on the other. It also includes a two-sided foldout poster featuring both sets of artwork, as well as 40-page booklet featuring essays by Bidisha, Anna Bogutskaya, and David J. Heuring. This wide release version of the Limited Edition includes a slipcover with the Sammelin artwork. (There was an Arrow Store exclusive version that used the theatrical poster artwork on the slipcover instead, but that appears to be sold out at this point). The following extras are included:
- Audio Commentary with Michael Lehmann, Denise Di Novi, and Daniel Waters
- Lehmann’s Terms (HD – 15:03)
- Pizzicato Croquet (HD – 11:09)
- How Very: The Art and Design of Heathers (HD – 15:12)
- Casting Westerberg High (HD – 11:40)
- Poor Little Heather (HD – 17:39)
- Scott and Larry and Dan and Heathers (HD – 38:25)
- The Big Bowie Theory (HD – 35:03)
- Return to Westerberg High (Upscaled SD – 21:22)
- Swatch Dogs and Coke Heads (Upscaled SD – 30:01)
- The Beaver Gets a Boner (HD – 19:51)
- Lethal Attraction (Heathers) Trailer (Upscaled SD – 2:55)
- 30th Anniversary Re-Release Trailer (HD – 1:47)
- Image Gallery (HD, 175 in all)
The commentary with Lehmann, Di Novi, and Waters was originally recorded for the 1996 LaserDisc release of Heathers from Lumavision. They provide a wealth of information about the writing, casting, shooting, and editing of Heathers. That includes the scenes that were rewritten, reshot, or completely eliminated, and the debates that they had over some of the scenes that they left in—including why they compromised over the ending. There are also some interesting practical tidbits, like the uncomfortable nature of casting the role of Martha Dunnstock. Since this was recorded only eight years after the film’s release, their memories are still fresh, so some details that they provide are probably a bit more accurate than the legends that have arisen over the decades since then.
The next several extras consist of interviews that were conducted for Arrow’s 2018 Blu-ray release of Heathers. Lehmann’s Terms is with Michael Lehmann, who covers his path to Heathers, including his experiences at film school and working at American Zoetrope. Pizzicato Croquet offers separate interviews with Lehmann and David Newman about the film’s score. How Very features production designer Jon Hutman, art director Kara Lindstrom, and Lehmann discussing the design work in Heathers. Casting Westerberg High is with casting director Julie Selzer, who provides her own perspectives on the casting process. Poor Little Heather is with Lisanne Falk, who describes what it was like going from the modeling world to the acting world. Scott and Larry and Dan and Heathers is a more casual affair with writers Scott Alexander, Larry Karaszewski, and Waters sitting down together to discuss their lives and careers. (It’s basically It Might Get Loud with screenwriters.) Finally, The Big Bowie Theory is an appreciation of the film by John Ross Bowie, author of the monograph Heathers from the Deep Focus Film Series.
Return to Westerberg High is a retrospective featurette that was produced for the 2008 DVD/Blu-ray release of Heathers from Anchor Bay, and it includes interviews with Waters, Di Novi, and Lehmann. They cover the writing, casting, and production of Heathers, as well as the legacy of the film in light of events like Columbine. They also pay tribute to two of the cast members who had already passed away by that point: Kim Walker and Jeremy Applegate. Swatch Dogs and Coke Heads steps back even farther than that, since it was originally produced for Anchor Bay’s 2001 DVD. It includes different interviews with Waters, Di Novi, and Lehmann, this time joined by Winona Ryder, Christian Slater, Lisanne Falk, Shannen Doherty, Francis Kenny, and editor Norman Hollyn. It’s a broader look at the making of Heathers, with all of the participants still looking impossibly young and fresh-faced. It’s probably the best starting point for anyone wanting to learn more about Heathers, with the rest of the extras expanding on the information that it provides.
Aside from the Trailers and an Image Gallery, the final extra on the disc is Michael Lehmann’s irreverent 1985 student film The Beaver Gets a Boner. No, it’s not what it sounds like. It’s actually about a teenage drug dealer who loses his stash and gets in deep trouble with his boss (Tony Cox!). It has shades of Cry-Baby in terms of how it celebrates juvenile delinquency while offering some extreme tastelessness (like selling heroin to Boy Scouts).
That’s a pretty comprehensive collection of extras, with the only noteworthy omissions being the script for the original ending (which Anchor Bay offered as DVD-ROM content) as well as a trivia track. But the script is available elsewhere, and trivia tracks are generally a waste of time, so neither one of them are much of a loss. With the addition of Arrow’s new 4K master, this is the definitive release of Heathers to date, and probably for the foreseeable future as well. The fact that there’s no Blu-ray included also means that it’s fully Region-Free, so you can safely buy it regardless of what kind of player that you have. And yes, you should indeed buy it. Don’t be a Swatch Dog.
- Stephen Bjork
(You can follow Stephen on social media at these links: Twitter, Facebook, and Letterboxd).