John Cusack plays a high school space cadet who apathetically considers suicide after his girlfriend dumps him for the captain of a local ski team. Stood up by his rebound date at a school dance, he bumps into a cute French exchange student (Diane Franklin) who dusts him off, shines a little light into his life and motivates him to seek revenge.

Dour material for a comedy, maybe, but Better Off Dead’s wacky interludes, effective running gags and dark sense of humor really make it work. Cusack is a weird kid with obsessive tendencies - his shrine to the first girlfriend is downright obscene - but he balances that with a grounded personality and a willingness to embrace life’s absurdities. Half the movie’s humor is derived from that last point. He’ll indulge the Japanese twins who challenge him to stoplight drag races (while channeling Howard Cosell), accept his Dad’s invitation to take a friend’s geeky daughter out for the night, repeatedly throw himself down a mountain... whatever it takes to break the monotony. It’s the type of role a teenaged Cusack was born to play, and he squeezes it for all the juice it’s got.

Writer / director Savage Steve Holland broke into the industry with this film, loosely based on his own experiences as a troubled teen, and it remains an outlier forty years later. Frequently blending fantasy with reality, it can be difficult to recognize whether the action is playing in truth or just in Cusack’s mind. Holland mixes stop motion and traditional animation into several scenes, and occasionally those dashes of impulsive surrealism can be too much, but such is the risk of mixing media. It’s still shockingly funny and well-written, with a sweet romantic subplot, dozens of excellent supporting players and belly laughs to spare. I wasn’t prepared for how much I’d still enjoy this.