Review of River's Edge (1986) by Allan C — 22 Feb 2014

BEWARE! Gen-X teens are horrible monsters and heavy metal music is to blame! It's been years since I've seen this film, but I remember liking it quite a bit back in the day. What I didn't really catch at the time is how much this film pandered to the 1980s Satanic Panic, where heavy metal and Dungeons & Dragons were turning our innocent youth to Satanism.

Loosely based upon a true story, the film follows a group of disaffected teenagers who don't know how to react when their friend Sampson murders his girlfriend. The teens react by either going about their lives or treating it all like it's a game.

Heavy metal music, long hair, drugs, alcohol, bad parenting, sex are all the culprits for these good kids going bad. Arcade games also make a brief appearance. They aren't worshiping Satan, but this film is clearly pandering to the public's fears of the phony Satanic cult epidemic spreading across America.

Because of this, the film now feels somewhat like a hysterical After School Special along the lines of "The Day My Kid Went Punk". If you want to go even older, you could call this an 80s version of the juvenile delinquent movies of the 1950s.

However, even though this is a cautionary tale to a problem that I don't believe really existed (Gen-X teens are not the horrible amoral monster we're made out to be), it's still an engrossing story with some terrific performances.

Keanu Reeves gives the best performance of his career (seriously, he does), playing one of the few in the group of teens with a conscience and realizes something is wrong with the situation. Ione Skye is equally good as part of the group who's uncomfortable with what happened but doesn't seem to know how to react.

Crispin Glover amazing as the self appointed leader of the group who thinks it's all a game and hides Sampson, Daniel Roebuck, at a 1960s burnout played by Dennis Hopper, who's also in hiding for killing his girlfriend back when he was a kid.

As crazy as Hopper's character is, he even realized that today's kids are even worse than his generation. This film and "Blue Velvet" came out the same time and both served to kickstart Hopper's career in a serious way.

Joshua John Miller plays Keanu's younger brother and is probably the scariest character in the movie. But like I said earlier, despite the film's hysterical commentary on the youth of today (who are now responsible 40 somethings), it's quite a gripping story where you really do care what happens.

I'd also forgotten how quotable the film was and how I used to like to repeat lines like "Food eater!" or "Get your nunchuks and your dad's car. I know where we can get a gun.".