August 20–27, 1998

movie shorts

Dead Man on Campus

Directed by Alan Cohn

An MTV/Paramount release

The plot of Dead Man On Campus screams black comedy. But it comes off instead as a surprisingly, even distastefully upbeat farce about suicidal tendencies.

Josh (Tom Everett Scott, That Thing You Do, American Werewolf In Paris) and Cooper (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) are freshmen at fictional Daleman College, and the quintessential odd-couple roommates. Josh, a straight-A student on scholarship, quickly gets caught up in the pot-smoking, party-all-night antics of Cooper, a rich kid whose father made a fortune in the toilet cleaning business. When the two receive their failing mid-term marks, the conflict is set. Josh must maintain a B average to keep his scholarship. Cooper, who's apparently flunked out of several colleges already, must pass or else look forward to a future in his father's business, gasp, cleaning toilets.

Rather than actually, y'know, studying, the two set out to test that old college legend—the dead man's clause. The clause exists, in one form or another, according to Jan Harold Brunvand in his book of urban legends, Curses! Broiled Again!, on basically every campus in America, yet no college has such a stipulation on record. The mythical clause states that if a student is murdered or commits suicide, then the deceased student's roommates get 4.0 GPAs. With an unoccupied room in their suite, the solution is, er, simple—infiltrate the school's psychiatric records, find the most suicidal student on campus (whom they name Mr. Z), and move him into the suite through Josh's work-study job in the housing office.

In case you hadn't figured it out from the ads on MTV, the three potential suicide candidates are the closest thing to bright points in the movie. Cliff (Lochlyn Munro) is a maniacal frat boy whose overindulgence is sure to get him killed any day. Buckley (Randy Pearlstein) is a deeply paranoid conspiracy theorist with enlarged surveillance photos of himself hanging on his walls. Matt (Corey Page) is a brooding rock musician who harbors a secret love for showtunes and was voted the happiest student by his high school.

Director Alan Cohn, whose previous credits include work on MTV's The Real World and visual consulting on Fox's King of the Hill, makes his feature debut with Dead Man. He has compared the film to The Producers, in which Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder must find the absolute worst musical imaginable in order to go bankrupt and make a fortune, and to Shallow Grave, the darkly comic Scottish film about murderous housemates. But the desperation of Wilder and Mostel, the paranoia of the characters in Grave, never really shows through in Josh and Cooper. In fact, they seem almost cavalier in their quest to find their (dead) man. Their characters are too shallow to be interesting, too trite to be funny. They walk around with the same "I-can-see-your-panties" smirk through the entire film.

It's like Porky's with suicide substituting for tits.