By Jae-Ha Kim
Chicago Sun-Times
August 21, 1998
There was one scene in “Dead Man on Campus” that elicited a really good laugh.
But I’m not sure whether it truly was funny, or if I was just so bored that it seemed funny at the time.
The premise of the “comedy”: A couple of irresponsible college freshmen slack off all semester and freak out when they realize they are about to flunk out of school. So instead of hitting the books and getting tutors, they do what all 18-year-olds do in that situation: They try to find a suicidal third roommate.
See, their stodgy school has a policy that allows the surviving roomies of a suicide victim to get automatic A’s!
A misplaced romance that adds little to the plot is thrown into the mixture.
That laugh I mentioned earlier occurs midway through the film when Josh (Tom Everett Scott) and Cooper (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) break into a building to steal the files of the school’s most unstable students. About to get caught by the university security guards, Cooper warns Josh, “Dinah, save yourself.”
Come to think of it, I guess it really wasn’t that funny after all.
