Reception
The film received positive reviews from critics with an 81% fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 21 reviews. The consensus was that "Better Off Dead is an anarchic mix of black humor and surreal comedy, anchored by John Cusack's winsome, charming performance." However, Siskel & Ebert gave the film two thumbs down.
Also, according to Savage Steve Holland, Cusack didn't like the film. Cusack walked out of a screening as both were making One Crazy Summer, later confronting Holland saying it "was the worst thing I have ever seen. I will never trust you as a director ever again, so don’t speak to me." Holland claims that Cusack felt he had been made to look foolish and that his comments "made me not care about movies anymore."
Read more about this topic: Better Off Dead (film)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)