I just want to start off by saying that I'm very thankful I wasn't a teenager in the 80's. The fashion was terrible. The music was terrible. Crime rates were rampant. Ronald Reagan was president. Actually, strike that last one, Reagan being president now would be an improvement, and I'm talking about his literally lifeless bones.
River's Edge, released in early 1997 to theaters (but listed on IMDB as 1986 because some of Keanu's earlier works seem to be a little out of order) encompassed everything wrong with the 80's, but most specifically the absolute apathy of growing up in a bumfuck town with nowhere to go and nothing to do.
I'd heard of this one before sitting down to watch it the other night but knew nothing about it so I did a little bit of research both before and after my viewing. River's Edge was actually very loosely based on a murder in 1981 where the killer, the victim's teenage boyfriend, apparently took about a dozen of his friends to see the corpse within days of killing her. Nobody said anything, nobody reported it to the cops, apparently they just didn't care.
And that's basically the premise of River's Edge.
The movie stars Keanu Reeves and Crispin Glover, along with major performances by Dennis Hopper and Joshua John Miller.
"Wait," you're probably asking yourself, "Who the fuck is Joshua John Miller?"
He's this guy, the incredible weirdo younger brother in the 1989 classic, "Teen Witch" who apparently grew up to become a member of Leonardo Dicaprio's clique, the Pussy Posse.
So, a quick summary of River's Edge:
The movie opens with teenage burnout loser Samson sitting over the body of his dead girlfriend who he strangled to death along the edge of the river. The reason he's killed her? Apparently she said something derogatory about his dead mother.
Samson proceeds to bring a number of his friends to see the dead body, including Matt (Keanu Reeves), Layne (Crispin Glover) and a number of others. Due to boredom, apathy or something else, nobody seems to be too affected at all by this, including the dead girl's best friends, who Samson also brings along.
In fact, the only person who seems to care at all is Layne who wants to do whatever he can to protect Samson from getting into trouble for the murder. So Layne decides to hide Samson at the house of the local shut-in/drug dealer/weirdo Feck, played by Dennis Hopper. Feck is a strange guy in that he apparently never leaves his house because he too once killed his girlfriend and is apparently a fugitive from the law, although it's never really explained.
There are two other weird tidbits about Feck. First, he's the world's nicest drug dealer. Local high school kids apparently go to his house and he just gives away weed for free. Second, he keeps a blowup doll with him at all times because apparently, it's the only "human" interaction he ever gets. Okay, sure.
Tim and Samson go for a drive. Please note Tim's sweet dangly sword earring. |
The movie takes place over the course of a day or a few days, it's a bit hard to tell, but eventually Samson tells his entire group of friends about what he's done and instead of you know, doing anything about it, they mostly sit around getting stoned and hanging out at the arcade.
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