I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Just rewatched this and found it as affecting as the first time I watched it when it came out. The search for a purpose the kids in this movie have and the lack of parental support are still issues resonating today. When the teacher thinks the kids should show they care by taking to the streets with a gun, it makes you realise why Brits will never understand our American cousins.

This movie was a fine unexpected surprise, I wasn't betting too much on it, since I had never heard of it (I stumbled upon the title casually, while watching a Dennis Hopper interview about Blue Velvet), but coming to think of it, why shouldn't anyone bet on it? It's got a great cast and an interesting plot. Unfortunately, I think today it files under the lost gems of the 80's label, but lucky are the ones who can dig it.If you look in the surface, it's a crime story with an interesting outlook on youth, including some (always welcome) weirdness by Crispin Glover and the late Dennis Hopper. But, after reflecting some more about it, it struck me that it's in fact a story about coping with death. We have a group of high school friends who are suddenly put against this insane situation, where one of them kills his girlfriend and starts bragging about it in school. What we see developing on screen afterwards are the effects that this scene, their friend's naked dead body near the river's edge, has on each one of them.After the first reaction, which can't be anything else but shock, each one of them deals with it in a different way, be it keeping quiet about it, telling the police but later regretting it, or even going into a sort of crazy breakdown – which is what Crispin Glover's character goes through, creating a fantasy in his mind that he has to save and help his friend escape no matter what. On the other hand, we have Dennis Hopper's character, Feck, who seems to be the only one who has been in touch with a death situation very similar before, and we can see where it's taken him. He is forced to face a situation like that again and, in his own way, too, will have to learn how to cope with death. Later on, we find out that Feck ended up killing John , because he couldn't accept his reasons for killing his girlfriend, which were different than Feck's, who killed his own because he loved her. The fascinating thing about this scene is that it shows that, the same way people react differently to the death of their loved ones and to death in general, people also kill for different reasons, and those reasons might as well not connect at all.

Samson 'John' Tollet (Daniel Roebuck) is a strange guy. But nobody foresaw that he would kill his girlfriend Jamie. He left her naked body on the river's edge. When he tells everybody, nobody believed him. When people actually saw the body, everybody must deal with it in their own way.The friends are all heavy metal listening slacker disaffected teens. Keanu Reeves plays the nice guy Matt. He's conflicted about Jamie's death. He knows something is morally wrong but he's unable to voice it at first. Keanu is able to inhabit this role perfectly. His uncomfortableness with Layne afterwards is amazing. Ione Skye plays Clarissa the sweet girl who just can't get up the courage to call the police. But it's Crispin Glover who steals the show playing Layne. He is the complete amoral weirdo. It's almost as if he enjoys the rush. It's more than a simple great movie. It's actually giving a slice of humanity and inhumanity without being preachy. It is unique.

Spoiler: My ex-girlfriend of ages ago said this had happened at her high school, Pioneer High, in San Jose, CA. Though she didn't get one of the tours of the corpse, she heard about it at the time and when it was made into a movie, of course, she made me watch the movie. I'd have to say, it's a creepy film - actually not the film's fault - the idea of giving tours of a crime scene is creepy and that's ironically what really happened. Still, there's something about that era that I find captivating and that all these kids who saw the corpse pretty much kept it to themselves, maybe saying "that's cool" and moving on. So odd that so many should have seen it and said nothing about it to the authorities. Like some kind of freak show attraction that nobody questions or feels guilty about viewing, like there's nothing morally wrong about it at all. I find it fascinating and yet sad that society at some point can break like this. Like as if you were in the midst of a drunken riot stampede and came upon a corpse or two that had been trampled upon but ran right over it anyway without a second thought because so many others before you already had. As if to say, all those people can't be wrong... and yet they are/were. Really great movie. Sad that it actually happened but maybe we can learn by the mistakes of others and not let morals slide aside just because a certain number before us already did.