12. Worst Movie Ever

My family is big into movies. On any given weekend you can find my parents, and siblings, all sitting on the couch watching the latest Redbox release. And what is a movie without popcorn? We always have popcorn, lots and lots of it. My dad has become quite the expert popcorn popper. So on this particular night everything was going great. All my family, cousins, grandparents, aunts and uncles were all gathered around the television, with lots of popcorn of course, to watch a new movie. It wasn’t just any movie. It was a movie my uncle Darin had suggest we watch. He said it was a “must see.” I am here to tell you now that it is not a “must see”. 

We love movies like Nacho Libre and School of Rock, which happen to have a common factor. Jack Black is the main character. When we picked up the “must see” movie, Bernie, we were thrilled to find out that the main character was in fact, the amazingly talented and hilarious, Jack Black. The movie starts out and we are all expecting a comedy. Yeah maybe Bernie technically is called a “black comedy”, but no one in my family laughed the whole entire way through the movie. 

In Bernie, Jack Black does not play a crazy substitute teacher, or a hilarious Catholic priest. He plays a middle aged, single, mortician named Bernie. He lives in a small town in Texas where everyone in the community loves him. He does so much service doing things like singing at church and teaching Sunday school. If anyone needs help with anything, they call Bernie. That doesn’t sound so bad does it? But it was. The mood that was given off by the movie was odd to say the least. Every situation felt awkward, and the lack of funny events was disappointing. But that was only the beginning. 

The movie started to become extremely weird when Bernie started to befriend this old, widowed woman. She was rich, mean, and very demanding. Bernie was probably the only person in the world that could put up with her. The thought of that is nice, but their relationship scared me. They did everything together and he basically became her slave. I couldn’t tell if there was some romance going on, or if he was just completely sucked into her demanding ways. 

After months had gone by, in the movie, you could tell that Bernie was done putting up with her. She treated him so terribly but expected him to do everything for her. So one day he shot her, and put her in the meat freezer.  He continued to live like nothing was wrong. He used her money to give to people in need. When people would ask about her he would just make up excuses. Until one day the woman’s stockbroker finally figured out that something was up. The woman was found and Bernie was charged with first-degree murder. That was an unexpected twist that no one in my family was expecting.

At the end of the movie something terrible is made known to you. The movie was based on a true story. It showed pictures and videos of the real Bernie in jail. Everyone in the room just looked around at each other in silence. We had no clue what we had just watched. But now I know. I had just watched the worst movie ever.