MOVIE REVIEW : A Hectic and Fun ‘Weekend’

“Weekend at Bernie’s” (citywide) is a one-joke comedy as fragile as a soap bubble. It never self-destructs, but because it threatens to at every turn, it unleashes so many laughs it could just end up a summer sleeper. Writer Robert Klane, who has “Where’s Momma?” among his credits, has taken an amusing premise, and director Ted Kotcheff and his young stars Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman run with it.

McCarthy’s laid-back Larry and Parker’s uptight Richard are decidedly junior executives at a Manhattan insurance company. So zealous is Richard that even on the hottest Saturday of the year he is reading computer printouts, when he discovers that $2 million has been paid out to a man already dead. Wow! He and Larry believe that this bit of information is sure to make their careers.

Sure enough, the top guy Bernie Lomax (Terry Kiser), slick woman-chaser and coke-sniffer, is impressed with the detective work--enough to invite the guys out for Labor Day weekend at his place in the Hamptons. It never occurs to them that maybe Richard wasn’t supposed to have been such a zealous investigator. But it’s Bernie who promptly winds up a corpse.

Klane ingeniously comes up with all sorts of happenings to keep Larry and Richard from contacting the police, and they soon have good reason to believe that it’s imperative that everyone believe Bernie is still alive. (It’s not all that hard, for apparently Bernie’s pals are used to seeing him zonked out.)

No, “Weekend at Bernie’s” isn’t the sly, darkly humorous “wandering corpse” picture that Hitchcock’s “The Trouble With Harry” is. It can’t in fact be accused of possessing so much as a shred of subtlety, but as a broad farce it’s not only cleverly sustained but frequently hilarious. What’s more, a weekend among the rich, the jaded and the corrupt is just the right cup of tea for an acid social satirist such as Kotcheff (who casts himself in an amusing cameo as Richard’s father).

Silverman, who starred in the film of “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” and McCarthy are deft and likable, but they’re upstaged by Kiser. The Broadway and TV veteran may be funny as a decadent crook, but he is outright hilarious as the corpse who just never seems to stay put. Little more than seeming understandably perplexed by the frantic Richard’s behavior is required of Catherine Mary Stewart, but she has a warm and lovely presence. Don Calfa and Catherine Parks get fresh laughs from those familiar gangster types, the heartless hit man and the sexpot mistress.

Production designer Peter Jamison’s setting adds much to the humor, especially Bernie’s high-tech beach house, big enough for a small air terminal, luxe enough for Gordon Gekko. (More detailed is Richard’s parents’ perfect echt -’50s apartment.) As a light summer refreshment “Weekend at Bernie’s” (rated an appropriate PG-13) hits the spot.

‘WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S’

A 20th Century Fox release of a Gladden Entertainment presentation. Executive producers Robert Klane, Malcolm R. Harding. Producer Victor Drai. Director Ted Kotcheff. Screenplay Robert Klane. Camera Francois Protat. Music Andy Summers. Production designer Peter Jamison. 2nd unit director Conrad E. Palmisano. Film Editor Joan E. Chapman. With Andrew McCarthy, Jonathan Silverman, Catherine Mary Stewart, Terry Kiser, Don Calfa, Catherine Parks, Eloise Broady, Gregory Salata, Louis Giambalvo.

Running time: 1 hour, 37 minutes.

MPAA-rated: PG-13 (parents strongly cautioned; some material may be inappropriate for children younger than 13).