Better Off Dead – Watch on TCM

Watch the classic movie Better Off Dead on TCM. Writer/director/animator Savage Steve Holland’s quirky offbeat comedy Better Off Dead (1985) stars John Cusack as Lane Meyer, a high school student who is thrown into despair when his girlfriend Beth (Amanda Wyss) dumps him for the captain of the ski team. Whenever he’s not thinking up creative ways to off himself, Lane dedicates himself to winning Beth back. In the meantime, Lane must deal with his mother’s bizarre cooking, his annoying neighbors the Smiths, and a deranged paperboy with a score to settle. Filled with eccentric characters, off-the-wall sight gags and a heightened sense of the absurd, Better Off Dead is a true comic gem from the 1980s.

Better Off Dead marked the feature directing debut of 25-year-old filmmaker Savage Steve Holland, who initially had the idea for the film right after college. When his girlfriend broke up with him, Holland was driven to half-heartedly explore ways to kill himself. “I went into the garage, and I put an extension cord on a pipe,” said Holland in a 2004 interview, “and I’m on a garbage can, and I’m thinking, ‘Should I do this? Maybe this isn’t a good idea.’ Anyway, it was a plastic garbage can, and my weight just like crashed through it, and I fell, and the pipe broke! And it starts pouring water everywhere. And I’m basically in a garbage can, drowning. And my mom comes and…starts yelling at me for breaking a pipe, which is what any mom would do. So I started writing down stupid ways to kill yourself that would fail after that, and I put them in sort of a diary. And that diary kind of became Better Off Dead.”

TV Schedule: Thursday, July 15,2010 8:00 PM