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List Price: $14.98 | | Label: MGM (Video & DVD)
Salesrank: 24060
Released: January 23, 2001 |
| Our Price: $4.34 |
| Used Price: $3.30 |
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
Based on the horrifying real-life murder of a young California girl, this "powerful portrait" (Newsweek) of deadly, disaffected teens stars Keanu Reeves (The Matrix), Crispin Glover (Charlie's Angels), Ione Skye Leitch (One Night Stand), Daniel Roebuck (Final Destination) and Dennis Hopper (Ed TV) in a tale that is "chilling to witness" (The New York Times). On the bank of a river lies the naked body of a brutally murdered young girl. Atthe nearby high school, Samson (Roebuck) brags to Matt (Reeves) and his friends about how he killedher. Drunk and stoned, the doubting teens trudge to the river and discover that he isn't lying. Andoddly, they decide to protect Samson behind a loyal wall of secrecy. Tormented with guilt, Matt questions their silence and suddenly finds himself in a troubling position: should he do what he thinksis right, or should he keep quiet and live with this demon for the rest of his life?
Description of River's Edge:
This disturbing little film is even more unsettling when you think about the fact that it's based on an actual case. Troubled teen Samson murders his girlfriend Jamie for no particular reason, leaves her nude body by the river's edge, then brings his friends to see the corpse to prove he did it. They look at her, prod her, and talk about her, but no one seems to manage to feel anything. River's Edge is ultimately a study of kids who are so numbed by drugs, casual parenting, and the ever present threat of nuclear war that not even death can get a rise out of them. A young Keanu Reeves is surprisingly poised as Matt, the one character with a few shreds of empathy left. His quiet performance is powerful enough to hold the audience's interest even with Crispin Glover and Dennis Hopper both being as crazy as they can be. Glover steals much of the movie with his whacked-out performance as Layne, the group's leader. He undercuts his teen alpha-male power with a nervous giggle, and the spin he puts on much of his dialogue manages to be scary and funny at the same time--after hiding Jamie's body for Samson, he complains: "You'd think I'd at least rate a Michelob!" River's Edge is not necessarily a pleasant movie, but it is certainly a compelling one. --Ali Davis
River's Edge Reviews:
The Bizarro World Of Teenagers 
2008-01-28 - If it came out today, River's Edge would be dubbed an indie flick, which is what it was, only back in the `80's I'm sure it was called something like "low-budget" because no doubt it was that, too. Indie, low-budget, whatever label you want to stick on this film, it actually delivers a watchable, puzzlingly intriguing plot from a young cast that by and large found later fame. Centering around the days immediately following the reasonless slaying of a teenage girl by her teenaged boyfriend, a killing that took place along a river's edge, this movie feels intellectually alienating, even as it also embroils subconscious instincts and compels a viewer to question what her or his own conduct might be if caught up in the situation presented here. A friend has committed murder, in fact unrepentantly committed murder, so what happens next? To what extent will and can normal life continue? Do you offer your friend help? "Do what is right" and go to the police? Is your friend suddenly someone to be feared? Far from being sensationalized, River's Edge proceeds so calmly downstream toward the inevitable rapids that it reaches something inside of almost everyone, even as it also disgusts, and not only for the crime at its heart, but because of the utter turmoil that exists peripherally and daily in the characters' lives. River's Edge isn't a classic but it is just different enough to stand out from most other movies of the Reagan era.
Interesting
2007-12-17 - 3.5 stars
Just saw this for the first time. Might have been a big deal 20 years ago, now it seems almost ironic. No one cares anymore about going to war with any country we're told is full of terrorists, so this is kid's stuff.
Keanu is so bad here that it's pretty funny. Glover is so weird that he actually carries this film, I'd say.
This is a topic worth exploring and a decent job of doing just that. Not great but pretty good, and most of the performances are solid, except old Mr. Reeves. My God he's helpless! Always looks cute though so that's why they keep hiring him 20 years later I guess. He seems perpetually confused in almost all of his roles. Type-casting?
Ione Skye was believably annoying, and Keanu's kid brother may have stolen this film if not for Glover's goofiness.
Worth seeing.
Back to the eighties 
2007-08-23 -
You want acting? Try another movie.
You want hair and clothes from the eighties. Try this one.
This is the high school movie for the not-so-pretty youth. Happy memories of younger days. And the references to Easy Rider are hilarious.
A Negative Image of the Good
2007-04-04 - A quarter of the way through watching River's Edge, I was having trouble putting my finger on the right adjective for the film or the way it was making me feel. "Discomforting/uncomfortable", "appalling/appalled", "disturbing/disturbed" all floated around in my head but were insufficient to describe the sense I had of a horrific...absence of something. I mentioned this to the friend who had been responsible for our movie choice of the evening, and he summed it up: "it's a negative image of the good". That was it. Or to put it in the words that came to mind shortly thereafter, as two degenerate 12-year-olds shoot crabs in a bucket for mild entertainment, "All wrong." Everything--everything--was just all wrong.
At first, this might seem appropriate, even inevitable, given the film's subject matter. River's Edge begins with a dead body; Samson, a high school Neanderthal pothead played convincingly by Daniel Roebuck, has killed a female classmate of his--for essentially no reason--and then tells his friends about the crime. The rest of the film follows the aftermath as hyperbolic Layne (Crispin Glover) makes it his (and their) mission to protect Samson, while Matt (Keanu Reves) and Clarissa (Ione Skye Leitch) act indecisively on a vague discomfort with this course of action.
But few films dealing with murder intentionally omit any internal viewpoint of morality or justice in the way that River's Edge does, and this is what makes it compelling and thought-provoking as well as deeply unsettling. On the back of the box, Matt is described as "struggling with guilt" over the decision not to turn Samson in, and indeed he does go to the police fairly early in the plot. Ah-ha, you might say, here is our standard of judgment. But numerous clues throughout undermine Matt's claim to moral objectivity, any strong sense of rightness that could shed light on the other characters' nihilistic apathy and dissoluteness.
Indeed the lack of deep feeling is a running theme throughout the film. Several of the adults accuse the kids of the crime of apathy--and yet we and they are presented with no appropriate example of feeling, no appropriate object for it. Clarissa's high school teacher idealizes the accomplishments of his generation ("We stopped a war, man"), Feck--the kids' drug dealer--accuses Samson of not loving the girl he murdered...like Feck had loved the woman he had killed many years ago. Every passion in the film, it seems, is misdirected, whether toward the trivial (more than once is rage expressed over beer) or the perverse. Samson's explanation of his crime--that he did it to "show everyone who's boss", that it made him feel "alive"--is chilling enough to shake the beliefs of the most devout Nietzschean. All in all, an exceptional film and well worth watching.
a great
2007-04-03 - i have searched for this movie for years. all of a sudden it hit me that amazon might have it and they did! although it is not a big production it has a great cast. keaneu reeves, dennis hopper and crispin glover all deliver in this. very disturbing flick but it is one of my alltime favorite movies. i will enjoy being able to watch this classic millons of times over.
