Remember the 80s? Probably not. Nowadays, people old enough to have clear adult memories from the 80s, and not just hazy childhood memories are in the minority. Most likely, you have no memories at all of the 80s because like billions of people, your birth year is higher than 1989. You might still remember the 80s by proxy, as in, remembering the 80s being remembered. Whatever the case, you probably have a good sense for if something is "80s", and Weekend at Berinies is very 80s indeed. It is a story that very much requires it to be the 80s to work. It has those guys; the typical 80s actor guys that were in other 80s movies. It has a wacky 80s party. It even features that kind of printer paper that had guider holes on the sides. How 80s is that?
To enjoy this movie, you have to appreciate the comical farce. It is about a mistaken assumption that leads to a lie, and efforts to maintain the lie give others mistaken assumptions, and the ruse has to escalate and get more elaborate and so on. They feel they need to carry a dead body around to trick others into thinking the dead person has not died yet. Does this jive with how actual dead bodies work and their rate of decay and such? I'm guessing probably not, but I'm not an expert on corpses and I'm not looking it up, so I don't know. Maybe it could work this way.
There is one detail that kind of might mean something to people who know about boats, and the personalities of types of boat owners. Bernie's boat has the word "premiums" on it. At first, I thought that was the name of the company that made the boat hull, as in it was a Premiums brand boat, rather than what Bernie named it, which is the real reason it has that word on it. I thought this because, smaller boats like that are not titled officially. It had some decals on the side with letters and numbers that work like license plates do for cars, and legally, that is the name of the boat; whatever that letter salad is. Boats under a certain footage of length don't have name titles, but people will symbolically name small craft out of pride or vanity. In some circles, that is seen as sort of a vain and egotistical thing because it was unnecessary to do. It would make sense for Bernie as a character to name his boat that didn't need to be named and think "premiums" was clever because he made his fortune through the insurance business. All this was something others likely saw as soon as they saw the boat, but in this case, my brain needed to do some cartwheels to get to the obvious conclusion.
Am I supposed to talk about this movie more? I mean, I mentioned the printer paper with holes in it and the thing about the boat title, right?