Dead Man's Curve [1998]

It's an urban myth [or is it?] that in American colleges that have a policy of giving the roommates of students who commit suicide an automatic straight-A mark to compensate for the trauma unscrupulous and ambitious academic underachievers have been known to murder their buddies and fake suicide notes to get the grades. This first feature by Dan Rosen, screenwriter of The Last Supper, is one of a wave of callous youth comedies to have come out of America in the years since Heathers, with Scream on the horror wing of the trend and Very Bad Things at the nightmare crime farce extreme. This is such a part of the Clinton era zietgeist that there was even another movie on exactly the same theme, Dead Man on Campus.

Under the credits, campus therapist Dana Delaney outlines telltale symptoms of incipient suicide in literary taste ['underlining passages in The Bell Jar would be a bad sign'], music ['anything from the 80s'] and movies ['first films from writer-directors ... I hate those']. Naturally, the punchline sets up Rosen's credit. Like Scream, the plot features kids who are appallingly callous even before the bodies start appearing and disappearing, with Matthew Lillard more or less reprising his role from the horror hit as he cuts loose with hilarious and show-stopping fiendishness as a cross between Ernie Bilko and the Devil Incarnate. Of the group, only the doomed Tamara Craig Thomas displays genuine feeling, which makes her even more of a target: 'you'll make Natalie cry,' her preppy boyfriend Randall Batinkoff is warned when he is being especially horrible to her, only for him to snap 'like that's a hard thing to do!' These are the sort of kids who restage the Russian roulette scene from The Deer Hunter with shook-up beercans, then plot to murder their closest freinds to get into Harvard.

As in Heathers [another obvious influence], all adult characters are caricatures of authority [menacing cops, jittery psychologist, strutting campus security guard] and easily manipulated by the killer kids. Like Heathers and The Last Supper [and, subliminally, Scream] Dead Man's Curve spins its nastiest ironies on the subject of class in America. The script insistently underlines the complex web of privilege and handicap that sustains and traps its characters, from the student-hating security guard's rant about the inflation of educational qualifications through the fetishising of Harvard entrance requirements to the poster on a student wall that declares 'You Don't Win Silver, You Lose Gold'. Thomas is floored in a guessing game by a baseball question because 'she's Canadian and a girl', and is similarly disqualified from birth and by temperament for competition with both the trust fund kids and the conscienceless social climbers who benefit from the 'dead man's curve' ruling. An ambiguity is that the characters the film condemns get all the best lines, though the twist-laden last reel does suggest that the worst of America will always be defeated by those who aren't quite as bad, if only because the totally monstrous will ultimately prove also to be the most self-destructive.
KIM NEWMAN

First Published In: The Ham & High

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