When I was 9 years old I saved up several weeks worth of allowances so that this copy of the 1987 Shelly Long comedy Hello Again could be mine for eternity. After watching it again this week for the first time in about 30 years I’m thinking the guy who sold this tape to me must still be laughing about it. She-LO, who pretty much cornered the market on playing hyper-literate yuppie white ladies in the 1980’s, plays hyper-literate yuppie white lady Lucy Chadman, a filthy rich Greenwich housewife married to a plastic surgeon played by the guy who plays Roger Dorn in Major League. They live in a mansion and go to parties like the ones in Eyes Wide Shut, minus the public group sex. (Is Sydney Pollock in the upstairs bathroom standing over a passed out hooker?). Lucy seems to have everything going for her except, get this, she’s clumsy! That’s it. She’s always falling over and spilling shit on herself and just embarrassing the piss out of Roger Dorn at public functions. Oh yeah..then she chokes to death on a Korean chicken ball fed to her by psychic bookstore-owning sister Zelda. (Note: the VHS box refers to said chicken ball an “oriental ball”. Not cool, dudes). So she’s dead and there’s a “people going on with their lives” montage. About a year later Zelda decides to go to Lucy’s grave and recite some spiritual mumbo jumbo and, blammo, Lucy is alive again! Like...there are no special effects of any sort. She just appears at her grave showing no signs of having been dead for an entire year. At first she refuses to believe that she was dead cuz, I mean, why would you? But Zelda is like “go see for yourself, gurrl”, which is a shitty way to treat someone you have resurrected from the dead. She quickly finds out that Roger Dorn has married her best friend Kimmy and her son has blossomed from a cuisine curious high school student into a full-fledged restaurant chef/owner (in a year?? fuck me, man). After an initial round of WTF’s people seem only mildly unsettled by the fact that Lucy is no longer a dead person. So great...where’s this movie going again?? OH! Zelda casually mentions in passing that Lucy needs to find true love before the next full moon or she totally has to return to being dead. Enter Irish Irishman and Miller’s Crossing star Gabriel Byrne as the ER doctor who did a piss poor job of saving Lucy from a Korean chicken ball back at the beginning of the movie. He’s determined to get to the bottom of Lucy’s undead-ness slash introduce her to his lucky charms...but then Kimmy leaks Lucy’s story to the media, who go predictably apeshit. Suddenly, Lucy is a hero and Paulie Walnuts from The Sopranos wants help getting in touch with a dead bookie he has a score to settle with. Kimmy tells the media that Lucy never actually died in the first place. Lucy decides to prove Kimmy wrong by showing up at the dedication of Roger Dorn’s new plastic surgery wing and conjuring the ghost of Kimmy’s ex-husband. Basically She-LO impersonates an african-american man with a gravelly southern accent for about 10 minutes and it’s uncomfortable AF. Sooo...now everyone believes that Lucy did in fact die and Roger Dorn loves her again but Lucy instead lets Gabriel Byrne carry her off to the land of Tir Na Nog. (I mean....why didn’t anyone suggest...you know...DIGGING UP HER BODY??) Anyway....freeze frame...movie over...thumbs down…
*originally posted on June 2, 2017