Weekend at Bernie's II (1993) poster

Weekend at Bernie’s II (1993)

Rating:


USA. 1993.

Crew

Director/Screenplay – Robert Klane, Producers – Victor Drai & Joseph Perez, Photography – Edward Morey III, Music – Peter Wolf, Production Design – Michael Bolton. Production Company – Artrimm Productions.

Cast

Andrew McCarthy (Larry Rosen), Jonathan Silverman (Richard Parker), Terry Kiser (Bernie Lomax), Barry Bostwick (Arthur Hummel), Tom Wright (Charles), Steve James (Henry), Troy Beyer (Claudia), Novella Nelson (Mobu)


Plot

Larry Rosen and Richard Parker are asked to identify their late boss Bernie Lomax’s body at the morgue. Meanwhile in The Virgin Islands, the local voodoo queen, The Mobu, forces two hoods to go and steal Bernie’s body in order to locate the voodoo money that he embezzled. They take Bernie’s body from the morgue and conduct a voodoo ceremony to resurrect him. However, the chicken they need to sacrifice runs away and they are forced to substitute a pigeon, which causes Bernie to come to life whenever music is playing. Fired from the firm because of their associations with Bernie, Richard and Larry then come up with a plan to steal Bernie’s body and go to the Virgin Islands, pretending he is still alive in order to claim the embezzled two million dollars in his account.


Weekend at Bernie’s II is proof of the complete and utter dearth of imagination that exists in Hollywood. The first Weekend at Bernie’s (1989) – a lame and unfunny comedy about two jerks forced to pretend that their boss’s body was still alive – was a one-off idea. The idea of a sequel brings a groan of disbelief. I mean, how can you expect to credibly float a film with the same two jerks forced to pretend a dead body is alive all over again?

The first film was dumb and annoying but the sequel’s attempt to milk the thinness of the idea creates a film that is mind-numbing in its stupidity. Some of the scenes in the first film with people at a party not noticing Terry Kiser is dead had mild amusement but the scenes here with Kiser being caught in a parasail, snatching two girls tops off as he is dragged down the beach and catching a shark on his leg as he is pulled through the water; or the sequence where he is hooked up and made to dance to music in order to drag a cart along, which then runs out of control, are so absurdly over-the-top as to be moronic. This is a film made by people who expect the only possible audience for it is other people sitting around half-drunk and laughing at the sheer stupidity of what they are watching.

Andrew McCarthy, Terry Kiser and Jonathan Silverman in Weekend at Bernie's II (1993)
(l to r) Andrew McCarthy, Terry Kiser as the corpse of Bernie and Jonathan Silverman

The sequel was directed by Robert Klane who had previously written the screenplay for the first film. Elsewhere, Klane has a handful of other screenplay credits including The Man with One Red Shoe (1985) and National Lampoon’s European Vacation (1985), as well as creating the unsold tv series Mr. & Mrs. Dracula (1980-1). Klane’s one other film as director was the earlier disco film Thank God It’s Friday (1978).


Trailer here

Director:
Actors: , , , , ,
Category:
Themes: , , , ,