"I love my dead gay son"

So I was hanging out with a bunch of cool high schoolers recently (they were attracted to my nondescript white van, with windows tinted for maximum privacy) and was surprised to discover that none of them had ever watched, much less heard of, "Heathers," which I caught on TV the other night for the first time in years.

Actually, I was interviewing those kids for a story about a chain of untimely deaths at their high school. Granted, it was probably bad taste to bring up "Heathers" in that context, but I couldn't just sit back and let one of the great cult movies of my youth fade into Oblivion ...

Perhaps that's fitting, since the same has happened to the careers of Winona Ryder and Christian Slater.
Hell, Shannen Doherty gets more work these days. All three have competing rap sheets, though Slater seems to have taken the lead in that category: just last year he was charged with groping a female pedestrian's butt on Manhattan's Upper East Side (following previous busts for trying to carry a gun on an airplane and for a drug-and booze-fueled rampage in Los Angeles. And, according to The Smoking Gun, his now-estranged wife was busted in Las Vegas in November 2003 for assaulting Slater during a domestic dispute).

On top of everything else, he's gone bald. The bright side: he now not only sounds like Jack Nicholson, but looks like him, too.

Doherty has kept her nose clean (legally speaking), of late. And we all know about Winona's troubles. Her resume is in worse shape: she hasn't made anything worth watching since a cameo on "Strangers with Candy" in 2000.