Better Off Dead is the kind of movie that people won’t really fess up to liking, but I’ve rarely met anyone who didn’t secretly love it passionately.

What it has in its favor is affability—some owed to Cusack’s gawky young charisma, some to Holland’s goofy tone and lightly surreal sense of humor, and still more to a cast where even the villains are mostly likeable...To paraphrase the opening narration in The Big Lebowski, Better Off Dead is the movie for its time and place. It fits right in there.

Better Off Dead has the body of a tired teen comedy but the soul of an inspired student film; it's the first movie in a long time to interrupt itself periodically with flights of animated fancy. At one point, romantic foreshadowing is accomplished by a "clay-mation" sequence featuring cheeseburgers in love. At another, a lovesick teen draws a cartoon picture of his faithless girlfriend, and the drawing tells him to get lost. [17 Oct 1985, p.B6]

Some of the gags in Better Off Dead have a lot more cleverness than the material - just another silly story about a lovesick high school boy and the cute, annoying habits of his friends and family - might warrant.

BETTER OFF DEAD possesses a fairly strong cast, some good gags, and a quirky sense of humor, but it suffers from the stereotyped characters and familiar situations that plague most movies about teenagers. What is refreshing about BETTER OFF DEAD is a deemphasis on sex and drugs. Unfortunately, only about half of the many jokes and gags in the film are actually funny.