the audience applauded

One of my all time favorites.

A Masterpiece!

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

Over The Edge is a classic film about teen angst that is very powerful, well done and authentic. While my junior high years were a decade later, these are the type of kids that I could hang with and relate to. This is pretty on point and truthful perspectives to the crowd that uptight adults refer to as "juvenile delinquents". The kids in this film aren't given much to do in the placid, condominium community of New Grenada. So when they are pushed to the boiling point, they push back hard and truly raise hell in this great film. This is taken from the point of view of the disenfranchised youth and the adult and authoritative figures are treated accordingly. This is all to the kick ass 70's sound track that includes Cheap Trick, Van Halen, The Cars and The Ramones. This is also the film debut of actor Matt Dillon, who gives a powerful performance as rebel youth Richie. Over The Edge is my kind of movie and reminds me of a lot of my own experiences as a bored and frustrated teenager living in the suburbs.

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.

I grew up in Aurora Colorado and I know where most all of the filming locations are. If your a location hunting buff here is the information. 1. Carl's House: The Park Townhomes located at the corner of E. Yale Ave. and S. Elmira Street in Aurora CO. You can GPS the intersection. The town-homes are on the southeast corner. 2. The Rec: This was a set built directly across the street from The Park Townhomes on the north side of E.Yale just about 50 yards east of the S. Elmira Street intersection. There is a large apartment complex there now.3. The party house: 1484 S Vaughn Circle Aurora Co. This is a private residence so please be respectful of the current owners. There is a large pine tree in front of the house now and it's painted a different color. 4. Richie's Apartment: The scene where Richie is with his Mom, in her orange jeep, was filmed along Cherry Creek Drive South, just east of Colorado Blvd between E. Kentucky Avenue and E. Mississippi Ave. The complex where he lived is the "Esprit Cherry Creek Apartments" on E. Mississippi. These have been totally remodeled but you can still tell it's the same place. The parking area where Richie and Carl jump into the jeep just before Doberman shows up is along the back side of the complex, which now has carports built there. 5. Much of the chase scene with Richie, Carl and Doberman was filmed on the Cherry Creek Dam Road which runs across the top of the dam. It is still there and looks the same. 6. Stawberry Fields: 2625 S. Vaughn Way, Aurora CO. The town-homes where Corey and Abby steal the gun. These are on the west side of S. Vaughn Way. In the movie they are painted yellow, they are now painted blue. The last set of these on the street is number 2625. The land beyond them was vacant then, now there is a grassy area with trees as the street begins to curve to the right.Hope you enjoy finding these if you are visiting Denver and Aurora.

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.