Over the Edge (1979)

I can't recommend this movie enough. This is hands down the best teenage rebellion movie ever made. "Over the Edge" represents the best of 1970's film-making.The young actors in this film are simply incredible and the writing captures the spirit of this moment in American history perfectly.

Fmovies: I was 14 when I first saw this movie on HBO in 1980. It was so much like my life at that time, it's uncanny. Of course, I grew up in an industrial area in northern Indiana, not a "planned community", and my dad wasn't a Cadillac salesman (in fact my dad was a lot more sympathetic than Carl's dad), but a lot of the rest was very similar. Getting beaten up, having stoned/drunk people all around you, basically nothing to do except hang out and listen to music...kids today who feel alienated should see this. I also think social workers, etc, who work with troubled kids should see this.

The music is one thing that really, really makes this movie what it is. I had the soundtrack on vinyl LP and I wish it would be released on CD! Van Halen, Hendrix, The Cars...it's all good. To be more accurate (for me), though, there would have been heavy doses of Kiss, Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, Rush, Black Sabbath, etc.

Please bring on the DVD! For anyone around my age who was this frustrated, this is one of several indispensable movies that will bring back memories; the others being "The Outsiders" and, on a lighter note, "Detroit Rock City".

Further than the imagery of white, middle-class American kids and teenagers getting high, speaking in an acquired voice and lingo to convey a both tastefully silly and unsettling angst, there's a visualization of America in Jonathan Kaplan's appealing, outlandish generation gap exploitation film that's anything but silly, and by now has basically become the norm. The details of the plot aren't all that essential. We're expected to grasp a sentiment of adolescent frustration and suspicion.

The locale is New Granada, one of those depressingly vanilla suburban districts that emerged all over this country in an upsurge of real-estate guesswork and substandard urban planning in the '60s and early '70s. New Granada is a development of dull condos, rigorously serviceable apartment blocks for those who cannot meet the expense of the condos, streets that bend futilely into badlands still to be urbanized, and an ultra-modern high school that seems like it's been built yesterday to accommodate tomorrow's automatons. It's the assertion of the filmmakers that the planners of New Granada made a grave gaffe in not bearing in mind that a quarter of its population would be 15 years old or younger, with nowhere to go except an old Quonset hut used as a rec center, nothing to consider and, most terrible, nothing to do.

The hub of the film is Carl, an ultimately good 15-year-old boy whose dad, a Cadillac dealer, frets more about selling than about where the kids are, before or after 10pm. Provoked by the case of his more experienced pal Richie, played by Matt Dillon, who auditioned for the role while skipping school, Carl starts to embrace the scornful, tough-guy characteristics of the rest of New Granada's youth, most of whom are on drugs of one kind or another. Carl keeps away from drugs but not danger. New Granada's fanatical policeman, Doberman, discriminatorily blames Carl and Richie for a practical joke perpetrated by two other troublemakers. Like a New Granada street, Carl's life doesn't seem to be progressing.

Doberman's jumpy shooting of one of Carl's friends induces the film's furious climax: The New Granada youth charge the high school, where their parents are holding an urgent assembly to argue property values and teenage crime, lock their parents into the school auditorium, and go on a huge sabotage binge. There's something unluckily amusing in the image of a smug child, who looks to be no more than 12, talking about scoring some hash for his friends, and about the quandary of another, just as young student who stumbles into an art class, having taken some LSD to begin the day, just to be faced with a projection of a Bosch painting.

The movie can't help idealizing its generally stupid teenagers, their incoherent yearnings and doubts, their disheartenment and, ultimately, their fuming revolt. Not including Carl and Richie, the youngsters aren't characters but a refrain of postures. Unlike other such films, however, this independent suburban wasteland drama dramatizes the tedium and futility of their world with exceptional sincerity. New Granada is a virtually unspoiled visual symbol of the incorporated obsolescence that's expected to perpetuate the American economy, but which makes crap faster than the crap can be used. If New Granada's kids are apathetic robots, they're only a spot more offensive and less self-righteous than their ignorant parents.

I suppose, the performances by the grown-ups in the film, p

Over the Edge fmovies. With all of today's problems plaguing teens and their parents, this movie may seem a bit tame, but at the time of its release, it had a pretty powerful message (assuming anyone paid attention). I remember watching this with some kids who were about the same age as those portrayed in the movie... These kids all thought this was the best movie ever made, and some commented that they wanted to do pretty much everything they saw in the movie. I remember thinking (not unlike "Billy Jack"), "why would you want to live in a community like this, where all the adults either hate you or fear you? To this day, I am drawn to and repulsed by this movie. That being said, I can't wait to get copy of this on DVD!!! It really was a good film, and I think it captured some of uglier realities of life in some of the "planned communities" of the time.

John Evens Jr. High School in Greeley Colorado had a casting call prior to the filming for extras. If I remember right we got 25 dollars for each days work and we got fed.

Greeley was pretty much the perfect place for this movie. There was a huge teen violence problem there. even at age 12 I carried a pistol and roamed the city at will with other kids fearing attack from gangs of older teens. Drugs were everywhere.

The movie captured all that stupidity plus the Apathy and ignorance of the adults. I loved the scenes where we rioted in the Circus tent styled John Evens Jr. High School......made it hard to attend class the following year.

History has proved that the film makers knew what kind of society America would become...Cookie cutter homes,strip malls and teen murderers......Art predicts life.

Despite the melodramatic ending this film is very realistic and thoughtful. This is Matt Dillon's first movie and he is very natural and believable. Because the film was shot on location it had a fantastic look and feel. If you want to know what it felt like being a young teenager in 1979 or even now, then rent this film.