After a rather memorable and geeky supporting role in Sixteen Candles, John Cusack moved front-and-center for Better Off Dead, a 1986 film about skiing, drag racing and the importance of paying your paperboy on time.
Cusack plays Lane Meyer, a high school student who thinks he has found his true love in Beth (Amanda Wyss), but she dumps him for Roy Stalin (Aaron Dozier), the captain of the ski team . A despondent Lane tries several ways to do himself in, but with no success. He does, however, cause plenty of collateral damage, including blowing up a neighbor and smashing his father’s beloved garage door windows.
Pushed past the breaking point, Lane challenges Roy to a race down the most dangerous slope in town, the K-12. Lethal enough to disable Olympic-level athletes, challenging the K-12 could actually help Lane achieve his desperate goals.
The heartbroken teen is saved, though, by Monique (the beautiful Diane Franklin), a foreign exchange student forced to live with a horrid American family. Monique helps Lane rebuild his classic Camaro, which has been rotting under a tarpaulin on the driveway for months. In one memorable scene, Lane finally is able to drag race against two immigrant brothers, who learned how to speak English from sports announcer Howard Cosell.
With some footage shot at Snowbird in Little Cottonwood Canyon, Utah, Better Off Dead definitely is one of the funnier outdoor films ever made. Much of the humor comes from a running joke involving a deranged paperboy. After Lane can’t pay his family’s newspaper bill, he finds himself ruthlessly hunted by the paperboy, who constantly chants “I want my two dollars.” He stages a late-night assault and even follows Lane down the K-12 on a tricked out bike, with a ski replacing the front tire.
The film reaches a great climax when a frantic Lane ends up skiing the K-12 on only one good ski. He wins the race, fights a duel with ski poles and takes his beautiful new girlfriend to her dream place, Dodger’s Stadium.
Resources:
http://www.skinet.com/action/2008-09/3-better-dead
http://www.snowbird.com/
