River's Edge

It's becoming exhaustive, and it's been a stream of really bad movies lately. Here's another one though: RIVER'S EDGE, a sort of anti-80's era film about teenagers. I admire the attempt at the very least: trying to counter the ridiculous lies of John Hughes films that minimize and degrade the teenage years to a series of rebellions against the obvious. But in RIVER'S EDGE, everyone's a real son of a bitch. The film opens to a young kid riding on his bike, stopping on a bridge and seeing an older boy sit next to a corpse. The corpse is that of his girlfriend's, distastefully stripped nude and laid against the grassy shore. The kid steals a beer for the older boy, and it soon becomes common knowledge that Samson has killed his girlfriend. He brags about it at school and shows the body to his friends, and they all have different reactions to it. Stealing the film is the wonderfully weird Layne (Crispin Glover) who defends Samson on the basis that he's still alive and perhaps they can assist him. Less sure however, is Matt (Keanu Reaves) who teams up with a young Ione Skye in questioning something that should be obvious. There's even a subplot with the kid from the beginning, a pot-smoking ten year old who tries to steal a gun from Dennis Hopper's Feck, a past killer himself. What becomes overwhelming though, is the attempt to make everything so down and out, so that it actually becomes unbelievable. There are some really attractive scenes here and there, but they all mesh together to make nothing shocking, and just all offensive. Sure John Hughes' films are bad and irresponsibly pretending to be the heartbeat of a generation, but this kind of film is the other extreme: one that chocks up to an elderly cry of "kids today" that's mired in fear and misunderstanding. This film portrays every teenager as a criminal, and its just as inaccurate and harming.

★ out of Five