Living in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do, the bored and disaffected teenagers of a poorly resourced planned community are eventually driven to revolt against the oppressive adult population in this searing drama written by Tim Hunter, who also helmed the similarly themed 'River's Edge' a few years later. The film tackles a very real issue that, with urban sprawl all around the world, still exists today: families lured into cheap housing in new communities that are improperly resourced to handle energetic adolescents. Indeed, while the parents of the film come under scrutiny for not understanding their kids and how boxed up they feel, the poor planning of the town is really the villain of the piece. It takes a long time for the film to make its point though, and with the revolt only occurring in the final third of the movie, there are a lot of repetitive scenes of the teens trying to score drugs, pick up girls and evade the sadistic police to firstly endure. The antagonism between the police and teenagers is a little undercooked too; while all the teens believe that the cops are hell-bent on power and tend to overreact, it is hard to blame the police for being like that if the teenagers do actually constantly vandalise their cars and create public nuisances for no good reason. Unless, of course, boredom is a reason, and say what one may about the film, the movie deftly shows the power of boredom to lead to mischief. Topped off with a mood-setting, eerie score by Sol Kaplan (of 'Niagara' fame), it is a haunting experience that lingers in the mind too.

In 1979, Jonathan Kaplan released an edgy film about juvenile delinquents starring an unknown group of teenagers with no acting experience. Thirty seven years later the film is a cult classic. 'Over The Edge' focuses on a circle of junior high friends who hang out at a recreation center. Carl (Michael Kramer) is an impressionable young man who hangs out with trouble maker Richie White (Matt Dillon). When a tragedy strikes the quiet community, a cop (Harry Northup) is determined to keep any other problems from occurring. Carl becomes an angry young man desperate to escape his parents and life in New Grenada.This movie was pulled from theaters due to controversies surrounding violence in theaters after the release of 'The Warriors'. Like that film, 'Over The Edge' is edgy, but it's not a violent film in reality. 'Over The Edge' was based on a news article about real life events in which teenagers decided to take over their town. The film is an interesting one due to the fact that most of the stars, including Dillon, were not professional actors at the time. The movie is packed full of great rock songs of the era by artists such as Cheap Trick and The Cars.I highly recommend this film to anyone who grew up in the seventies or enjoy seeing Matt Dillon. This film is also popular with younger audiences who did not get to grow up in the seventies.

Matt Dillon made his acting debut in Over the Edge playing a punk kid, a character he would parlay into a few more coming-of-age movies in subsequent years. He managed to have a pretty fair career despite the typecasting. Here, his nascent bad-boy personality and charm kick the movie up a notch or two, making a household name for himself in the process.New Grenada is a fictional town in the middle of the desert, a planned community. There's nothing for kids to do, save for hanging out at the local recreation center - which inconveniently closes at 6 pm. It's only a matter of time before the garden-variety vandalism worsens, and sure enough, when two kids fire a BB gun at a police-officer's car from an overpass, tensions in the town become proportionally thicker.At the center of the movie is young Carl (Michael Eric Kramer), son of the homeowners' association president, who's trying to get Texas millionaires to buy some prime real estate in town (rather than build a bowling alley). Carl is described as a nice, smart kid who happens to run with a rebellious crowd, particularly the perpetually on-probation Richie (Dillon), who wears his damn-the-man attitude like a pair of tighty whities.The scourge of the kids' existence is authority in the name of one Officer Doberman (Harry Northup), who is not above harassing the kids any chance he gets. And, for much of the movie, he gets plenty of chances. And when the rec center is inevitably shut down (the better to prevent the rich investors from noticing the Kid Problem), all hell really breaks loose in a realistic, tragic denouement.The script (by Charles Haas and Tim Hunter) effectively illustrates the angst of late-seventies teens desperate to do something, anything, to entertain themselves, something that'll gain themselves notice if not notoriety. The movie is loosely based on an incident that occurred in a real-life planned community in California in the early 1970s and certainly still rings true today.

Did the film makers depict a place, time, and sociological phenomenon accurately? Yes. But it wasn't balanced. You don't meet any good kids, and you don't meet any fully engaged parents. Yet in any town, there will be plenty of kids who use their time constructively, and parents who love them and teach them good values. Surely some of those families would have been involved with church, youth sports, scouting, or 4H, etc.Shooting a police car's front window while it's on the highway is not an act of heroism. Yet the whole movie essentially revolves around covering up this act, and glorifying it all. Yes the absentee parents are partially to blame for their kids' nihilistic attitudes. But are we really sure that the kids would have listened to them, even if they were more engaged? Some people are just evil, and Junior High is the time when it first comes out most profoundly. There is nothing inherently wrong with fresh 1970's planned suburban communities. They are what you make of them. These kids seem to have no sense of connection to their country, their state, their town, their school, their families, or their God. Again, the parents are to blame for some of that. However, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.But this is a movie, not a doctoral thesis. The location choice, the soundtrack usage, particularly the final "Ooh Child" song, and the line about the irony of escaping the city so that the kids wouldn't go bad, and then having them go bad anyways, were quite effective. But when people say they loved this "cult classic," is it because it was well made, or because they identify with the kids? I do not identify with them, and I was there. I despised them when I was there. I've also noticed that to some degree, the rest of life is just a reenactment of the teen years. There are the adults that have affairs, bully employees, abuse substances, and cheat on their taxes, and those who pursue a more wholemome track. In popular culture, we still admire the amoral rebel, or even the savage. Be it in Fast and Furious, rap music, or Ultimate Fighting.The real lesson of the film is what happens when the evil inclination of a human dominates their soul, and is allowed to run amok.