Teen suicide is no laughing matter -- at least under normal circumstances -- but that seemingly safe assumption is put to the test in Heathers . Revisiting the film with Anchor Bay's curiously titled two-disc 20th High School Reunion Edition -- curious because the movie was released in 1989 -- it is interesting to find that the passage of time has done nothing to dilute its razor-sharp black comedy.

As the flip (and dark) side of John Hughes' youth-oriented flicks of the Eighties, Heathers draws blood by slicing through the unforgiving social hierarchies of high school. It imagines how tensions between popular kids and pariahs can lead to murder, a conceit that seemed ripe for lampooning long before Columbine leant a whole new meaning to teen angst. Now, much of Heathers seems disturbingly prescient.

Our heroine is Veronica (Winona Ryder), a smart, pretty high school junior who has discarded her old dweeby friends in favor of the "in" crowd. Her newfound clique consists of three cold-hearted beauties named Heather -- Heather Chandler (Kim Walker), Heather Duke (Shannen Doherty) and Heather McNamara (Lisanne Falk) -- who rule Westerburg High. Veronica chafes at her cohorts' bitchy cruelty, but, like most of her classmates, she is too scared to challenge their authority.

Until she falls in love, that is. Veronica takes one look at J.D. (Christian Slater) in the cafeteria and she is smitten with the trenchcoat-clad rebel who has recently moved to town with his widowed dad. Veronica and J.D. bond over convenience-store delicacies and their hatred of the Heathers before consummating their mutual attraction with a round of strip croquet.

Talk turns to the insidious Heathers. Unlike Veronica, however, J.D. is more than willing to act on his fantasies of violent retribution. Trouble brews when the teen lovers get Heather Chandler to drink a hangover remedy that J.D. has laced with a lethal amount of kitchen cleanser.

Heather Chandler drops dead, and Heathers catapults from middling black comedy to something truly daring and caustic. A panicked Veronica and J.D. arrange the girl's death to look like a suicide, complete with a forged suicide note in which Heather complains that no one knew the real her.

Much to Veronica's dismay, the fake suicide makes Heather Chandler more beloved than ever. The dead girl is mourned by kids who detested and feared her, mythologized by the parasitic news media and turned into a cause célèbre by a touchy-feely teacher with delusions of grandeur. Adding insult to injury, Heather Chandler is replaced by the no-less-tyrannical Heather Duke. Veronica falls in deeper with J.D. and his psychotic designs, and the deaths at Westerburg High begin to stack up. "My teen angst bullshit now has a body count," Veronica confides in her diary.

As the feature-film debut of director Michael Lehman and screenwriter Daniel Waters, Heathers boasts the exuberance and unevenness that comes with hungry young artists bursting with ideas. In the DVD commentary, Waters admits that his script was 300 pages; he hoped it would be the ultimate statement on high school pictures, a movie worthy of Stanley Kubrick.

While Heathers falls a little short of such grand ambitions, it is nevertheless a fusillade of smartly caustic dialogue and plot twists. Hoping to create a timelessness to his tale, Waters invented teen colloquialisms and slang that still resonates with cinephiles, from "swatch dogs and Diet Coke heads" amd "what's your damage?" to the ever-popular, "Well, fuck me gently with a chainsaw."

My personal favorite line arrives after J.D. and Veronica kill two homophobic jocks and stage the deaths to be the suicidal result of a gay love affair (J.D. leaves a bottle of mineral water by the bodies, a telltale sign of homsexuality in small-town Ohio). At the funeral, a grieivng father stands over his son's open casket -- the corpse decked out in football helmet -- and sobs, "I love my son! I love my dead gay son!"

Hey, I told you the movie's edgy.

Occasionally it suffers from an abundance of edgy. Heathers holds up much better than I was afraid it would, but there is the sporadic overload of cleverness. A case in point is Heather Chandler's death. She downs the cleaning solution, gags and violently crashes through a glass table. Nicely done, but director Lehman then allows a string of witticisms that screenwriter Waters has foisted upon Ryder and Slater. The litany of ironic utterances -- Veronica just killed her best friend and worst enemy, Veronica will have her SAT scores send to San Quentin instead of Stanford (since the movie takes place in Ohio, maybe she could've mentioned a penitentiery in the Buckeye state?) - is excessive and doesn't come easily for the able actors. I don't mean to quibble, especially since the vast majority of Heathers is so much nasty fun. But such overindulgence does reflect filmmakers who were just out of the gate and perhaps overly eager to strut their stuff.

The leads certainly make the most of the spotlight. Some critics razzed Slater for what sure looks to be a Jack Nicholson impersonation, but the shtick suits the character. J.D. does fancy himself the dangerous agitator ready to topple sacred cows. If Jack Nicholson invented the language of such iconoclasts, so be it. But Winona Ryder, who celebrated her sweet 16th during the filming, owns Heathers. Volatile as a firecracker and potent with the righteous indignation that can only come from youth, she gives a career performance. It's a mighty good thing New World Pictures didn't get its way; the studio directed that the part first be offered to Justine Bateman.

Presented in widescreen anamorphic 1.85:1, the DVD's picture quality is servicable and generally free of defects. The images tend to be soft, however, and colors are disappointingly muted in several scenes.

The Dolby Digital 5.1 track is solid, if unspectacular, for what is essentially a dialogue-driven movie. The only optional subtitles are English for the hearing-impaired.

For an allegedly souped-up two-disc edition, Anchor Bay is disappointingly skimpy on extras. Disc One includes a commentary with Lehman, Waters and producer Denise Di Novi that appeared on Heathers' previous DVD incarnations. The remarks are informative, friendly and humorous. Waters is a hoot, admiting to some sizable novice ambitions on his part and that he really wanted Jennifer Connelly to portray Veronica. It's also inadvertently funny to hear Di Novi muse in 1997 how the fashions in Heathers have a timeless quality. Egads.

The remaining supplemental material is found on Disc Two. Again, a recycled extra is a making-of featurette from 2001, Swatch Dogs and Diet Coke Heads. Clocking in just shy of 30 minutes, it includes wide-ranging interviews with cast and crew.

Much of the same ground is covered in a new retrospective, the 21-minute, 20-second Return to Westerburg High. Newer does not mean better in this case, however, and this updated piece is conspicuously devoid of appearance from Ryder and Slater. Disc Two also includes a theatrical trailer and an excerpt of the screenplay's original ending on DVD-ROM.

Considering that the only real addition of note is a so-so retrospective, Anchor Bay's Heathers -- 20th High School Reunion Edition is hardly worth a double dip. But if you don't own this flick already, what are you waiting for? How very ... very ...