Dead in the Head

It's definitely a 'check your brain at the door' movie," admits Lochlyn Munroe, who plays extreme frat boy Cliff in the new Paramount Pictures and MTV film, "Dead Man on Campus."

It's so refreshing to get things out in the open.

Once you've realized that this movie is dumb, and not going to be in line with your own personal college experience, or even close to that of your friend's, then you're in the right mindset to see this film and actually not hate it.

Mark-Paul Gosselaar was Zack of "Saved By The Bell," after all. That's something no one can get away from.

Gosselaar looks perplexed during an interview in Los Angeles. This is his first big film, so his nervousness is not without cause. He walks into the roundtable session, asks if everyone has seen the movie, and then tells us to pay to see it again.

These are the kind of hoops you have to jump through when you're a recovering child actor, making a movie that's only the framework of a comedy. "Dead Man on Campus" has the comedic formula right; it just doesn't go beyond.

"Back when I was on a show, TV actors never went to film - you always stayed in your environment. It was unheard of for TV actors to do movies. And if you did it, there wasn't an audience for it," said Gosselaar.

Now, however, with Mark-Paul Gosselaar and other TV actors making it on the big screen, like George Clooney and Neve Campbell, it seems the tides have changed. Or have they?

"Dead Man on Campus" represents the movie industry's feeble attempt at reaching out to the young. In no way does it even attempt to be meaningful; instead, it tries to be stupidly funny, to reach the ranks of other college-geared goofy movies like "Revenge of the Nerds." Humorous parts include someone falling down or doing something stupid, thus creating a half-assed physical comedy labeled "dark comedy."

Poppy Montgomery, who plays Rachel, the girlfriend of Tom Everett Scott's character, Josh, put it this way: "There's this big slew of horror movies right now, and this not that - it's actually the antithesis of that. There haven't been movies made like this in a long time, not since "Porky's" and "Animal House" and all that, so it's sort of a throwback to that, like, '80s crazy, wacky college film thing."

Director Alan Cohn, who's worked on such projects for MTV as "The Real World," and "Pirate TV," describes the movie as treading what he calls "the 'Porky's' line."

"I wanted to make a movie that I thought was funny, and I didn't want to make a movie that was too dark, because I think that the subject matter is dark," explained Cohn.

The movie begins with Josh arriving at prestigious Daleman College on a scholarship, ready to take on lots of units and focus on school. His roommate, Cooper, played by Mark-Paul Gosselaar, is all about having fun. He's there because his dad is rich and could buy his way in, but he doesn't see any reason to go to class when he could be drinking or taking hits off his 4-foot purple bong. After a while, Josh gets courted by the dark side and slacks on his schoolwork, and both of them find themselves three weeks from finals with failing grades.

And then, the Godsend - a shriveled drunk in the townie bar lets them in on a secret: the "dead man clause." Somewhere in the school charter, it says that if your roommate commits suicide, you get A's for the semester.

The search for the most psychotic student on campus begins.

Josh and Cooper's plan is to find this man, and move him in to their room, so they can reap the benefits when he offs himself. That way, nobody has to commit any wrongful acts, no one has to study, and everyone comes out clean in the end.

One would question the comedic qualities associated with suicide. The way Josh and Cooper become obsessed with finding someone who is on the verge of taking their own life can get chilling. Cooper even volunteers at the campus Suicide Hotline in order to learn more.

Remember "Heathers," that late 1980s flick starring Christian Slater and Winona Rider? Dark comedy about suicide, really funny. So how does one go about making such an offensive and disturbing premise work? If you learn anything from this movie, or from this article, it's going to be how to make a comedy. "Dead Man on Campus" is a good example for a comedy formula; it may not be even close to the funniest movie you've ever seen, but that's the beauty of examples. They marginally simulate real life in order to prepare you for the real thing.

First you need a dynamic duo. Here we have Josh and Cooper. "There's something about (Cooper) that's just twisted enough that I like in him, and I like Josh's character a lot, and I think that's the key thing. You want them to succeed," said Cohn.

"In a comedy, if somebody like W.C. Fields is like, kicking a kid, then you know they gotta get run over by a steamroller after that ...because worse things are happening to them than they're doing." Secondly, you need some kind of "save the world" plan that the dynamic duo will stop at nothing to complete. What really twists this movie is that the twosome's plan will benefit them and only them, and it involves the actual death of a fellow classmate.

Gosselaar coined it as "the S-F syndrome, the Sick Fuck syndrome. It was kind of our model on the set; we were very twisted demented sick fucks."

Next, you need to have the stream of psychos, of sort of evil-doers, who try to bring the good guys down. That's where Cliff, the frat boy played by Munroe, and Buckley, a paranoid obsessive-compulsive played by Randy Pearlstein, come in. As the two potential "Mr. Z"'s, they are right out of those horror-stories you hear about roommates in college.

Finally, you need an element of Hollywood, some kind of acknowledgment that this could never really happen this way because it is, after all, a movie. Montgomery called it "the suspension of disbelief"; in this case, the lead role is played by the man who was the quintessential high school master of mischief, Zack Morris. The viewer should expect the same sort of stupidity that characterized a spoof high school TV show.