My Boyfriend’s Back… Just In Time For October
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009October is here! And I know I’m not alone in regarding it as the most exciting and fun time of year. In my excitement for the month in which almost everyone indulges in spooky movies, I wanted to start out giving some attention to a new addition to Film is Truth’s great supply of Halloween movies.
My Boyfriend’s Back (1993) is my new favorite movie to recommend to basically anyone this Halloween. Its lovable cheesiness and crooked sense of humor coincide with most of my “guilty pleasure” movies, but in this one I lack any sense of guilt. I first heard about this comedic take on a zombie story in “Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide” and had low expectations due to the bad review it received from the author Glenn Kay.
The story is Johnny Dingle’s. He’s a small-town, plaid-clad nice guy, who has been infatuated with Missy McCloud since the first grade. 
Now in senior year, he finally decides to make a move when she breaks up with her quarterback boyfriend Buck (played by Matthew Fox of Lost). He approaches her at the convenient store where she works after school, but his dashing plan to sweep her off her feet goes wrong and Johnny gets gunned down by a robber. As he’s dying on the floor of her workplace, he asks Missy if she’d like to go to the prom with him. Not one to refuse a dying wish, she says yes. But the night of his burial, Johnny rises from the grave and heads home. The groundskeeper warns him that he can’t leave the cemetery or he’ll decay, but all Johnny can think of is his date Friday night.
Now, the review I’d read claimed that since it was advertised as a romantic comedy and then incorporated horror, it only grossed out its rom-com audience and fell short of what the horror crowd wanted. While I will agree that not all those who like rom-com will like this movie, anyone who enjoys a silly comedy will. And there’s no way it was expected by anyone to be a horror movie (if anyone so much as looked at the case with Johnny’s friendly but pale face and “oops” shrug). 
In fact, much of the humor in the movie is due to how un-horrifying the situation is. For example, the first day out of the grave, after shocking his peers by still coming to class, he attempts to bite his friend Eddie’s arm during lunch. After Eddie yells at him, Johnny smirks and says, “It was just gonna be a little bite.”
Even though he becomes the victim of prejudice in town, he also has the support of his surprisingly unshaken parents and a doctor who’s befuddled yet determined to help keep him from decomposing. And best of all, he begins to win the interest of Missy who claims, “I’ve never kissed a dead guy before you, Johnny.”
It is obvious, to me anyway, from the premise of the movie, with its silly attitude and the friendly good-guy zombie that this movie is not meant to be taken seriously. Not as a rom/com or a horror flick (although of course anyone with a slightly dark sense of humor won’t be able to help chuckling throughout). Stuffed with great one-liners (“I’m just dead, it’s not like I’m an asshole or anything.”), hilarious cameos (Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the bully on Johnny’s tail and Matthew McConaughey as Guy#2), and puns on everything zombie, this is simply a dorky comedy, perfect for Halloween.
Now, I’m always a little too prepared for Halloween, and that is true this year as well. I made a Halloween list, a Horror list, but it just didn’t cover enough of the scary/silly Halloween flicks I want to recommend, so I made one more. This list is just another ten October movies I love and would encourage anyone to see. Here they are:
1. They Live - too many cool things about this one to name briefly.
2. Possession (1981) - Not for the faint of heart. This one is weird as hell, but I guess that’s why I find it so fascinating.
3. Zombie - Meant to be a sequel to Dawn of the Dead, this film has some really awesome gore, plus a scene where a shark and a zombie battle it out!!!
4. In the Mouth of Madness - Sam Neill stars in John Carpenter’s homage to H.P. Lovecraft about a writer whose fictional nightmare begins to overtake reality.
5. Opera - Amazing for 85% of the movie, until the 70s hair metal gets incorporated. Still, seriously worth seeing for some classic Dario Argento macabre.
6. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer - Brutal, awesome, realistic representation of a serial killer.
7. Freaks - The spooky classic that hired actual circus performers for the roles of the “freaks”.
8. The Fly (1986) - So cool. So crazy. So very David Cronenberg
9. White Zombie - The very first zombie movie! The idea of the zombie first came from beliefs about voodoo, and in this flick the legendary Bela Legosi plays “Murder” Legendre, who controls the will of the zombies.
10. Return of the Living Dead - A silly zombie flick where a group of punk rockers who just want to party get trapped inside a mortuary and surrounded by hordes of the undead!
