My Boyfriend's Back (1993)

The few times I’ve gone in to review a movie and expected it to be gutwrenchingly awful I've been…well, let's say my expectations were met and sometimes exceeded. With My Boyfriend's Back, I was expecting a comedy that would rip out my funny bone and beat me on the head with it until my skull became a paste. For the first time ever, though, I found a movie wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. But, sadly, it wasn’t that good either.

The great thing about My Boyfriend’s Back is that it knows what it's doing. The opening narration is told over the pages of a comic book that imitates to the slightest detail the look and atmosphere of an E.C. horror comic. The plot, with its picture-perfect and generic suburban American backdrop, its black-and-white characters, and the expected archtypes (it even has a delightfully out-of-place mad scientist with a castle!), lives up to a movie that would stir up memories of those old "Tales from the Crypt" issues.

Now the problem with My Boyfriend's Back is that, while it knows what it’s doing, it doesn’t quite take the script that far. It wants to merge black comedy with PG-level humor, something that some of Tim Burton’s works and the first two Addams Family movies do perfectly. Sometimes this movie makes healthy strides toward that goal. When our protagonist Johnny comes back as a zombie, the news is greeted with a surreal level of acceptance by everyone, from the groundskeeper to his parents to even his schoolmates. The movie doesn’t stop with Johnny coming back from the dead, but becomes an examination of the prejudices and day-to-day problems a zombie must face in today’s world, especially since he finds he must eat the flesh of the living to stay "alive". Concerned about their undead son’s eating habits, Johnny’s loving parents pick up a small child for him to snack on (much to his own dismay). His love interest, Missy, develops a new necrophiliac passion for Johnny now that he’s a reanimated corpse ("I don't know what it is about you now, Johnny...") and accidently bites off his ear during a make-out session. And, of course, Johnny later has to deal with the problem of resisting the urge to literally eat his girlfriend (as you might expect, the movie milks that joke for everything its worth.) As funny as these and the other scenarios poor undead Johnny finds himself in might be, especially to those familiar with the zombie sub-genre, they feel somewhat out of place in this movie. Unlike with the other movies I mentioned, the black comedy and the lighter humor are like oil and water here.

Still, the problem isn’t from the creators' apathy or a lack of trying. The acting here is surprisingly good and character-appropriate without falling too deeply into the characters' own cliches and archtypes. Andrew Lowery and Traci Lind do well enough in capturing the spirit of the classic star-crossed teen couple, despite the nature of Johnny's affliction. Austin Pendleton does an excellent job as a harried mad scientist who has to impatiently deal with an angry mob torn right from James Whales' Frankenstein. But real kudos go to the actors portraying Johnny’s parents, Edward Herrman and Mary Beth Hurt, both of whom bring the right blend of “Brady Bunch”-esque parental perfection and downright creepiness to the mix.

Certainly My Boyfriend's Back doesn’t quite succeed in being a soft-hearted black comedy, but no one can argue that it isn't a unique effort. How many movies out there has a man tormented by his inner desire to cannabalize his girlfriend?

Cast Connections:

Writer Dean Lorey also did the script for Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday.