In short: My Boyfriend’s Back (1993)

Teenager Johnny Dingle (Andrew Lowery) has been silently pining for Missy McCloud (Traci Lind) since they were little children, so when Johnny dies because he heroically jumps into a bullet for Missy but comes back as a zombie, he’s finally going to do what he never dared when he was alive. Missy did after all promise to go to the prom with him – when he was dying in her arms.

Turns out the whole saving her life business and coming back as a slowly rotting corpse is a bit of turn-on for Missy, so the prom situation does look indeed promising. However, being a zombie isn’t all it is cracked up to be. There’s a whole load of troubles coming with undeath: body parts that just might fall off during an even mildly heated make-out session, the special appetites of the living dead, mad science, jock boyfriends and torch-wearing mobs. Getting to prom with one’s beloved turns out to be rather on the difficult side.

As frequent (long-suffering) readers of this blog know, I’m not the greatest fan of horror comedies in general, and teen horror comedies are usually even more difficult for me to cope with. Bob Balaban’s My Boyfriend’s Back however, did charm me from the very start with its witty mix of the clever, the cynical, the sweet, the goofy and the heart-warming. Even better, it’s actually funny throughout, taking detours in all kinds of bizarre directions, suddenly pretending to turn into a kind of anti-prejudice afterschool special for five minutes, or spending valuable time on insane side-characters just because they are funny, or deciding to finish its plot very much like a supernatural screwball comedy. The male teenage wish fulfilment fantasy elements of the plot are more thoughtfully used than in many comedies of this type, too.Missy sometimes even feels like an actual character, if one of dubious mental health. Here specifically but also in general Balaban clearly prefers to give surprise twists to popular tropes until they become funny to not using or loudly decrying them, suggesting much more control over the material than the distractible nature of the plot would hint at.


Star spotters will be happy finding Matthew Fox as Missy’s jock boyfriend, Philip Seymour Hoffman as his hilariously angry (and very excitable and tasty) best friend, and Matthew McConaughey as “Guy #2”. Also, it’s really just a very funny movie.