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Over the Edge
Warner Bros. // PG // September 20, 2005
List Price: $19.97 [Buy now and save at Amazon]
The fledgling desert city of New Granada describes itself as a planned community, but noticeably absent in its plans are much of anything for the dozens of teenagers 
who live there to pass the time. Plans for a bowling alley and drive-in (the movie was filmed and is set in the '70s, as if that wasn't a dead giveaway) are scrapped when the town's fortunes sputter, preferring instead to court Texas investors to support a prospective business park. With no place else to go and nothing to do, the town's teenagers turn to drugs and violence, causing the adults to view the children as an unprofitable nuisance. These parents love their children, naturally; they just aren't sure what to do with them and aren't interested enough to try to find a real solution. Not wanting to give investors the wrong impression of what New Granada has to offer, they claw blindly at any excuse to shutter the kids' one and only outlet, a cramped, almost laughably small rec center.
Carl (Michael Eric Kramer) is a good kid who's started to run with the wrong crowd in New Granada. He fawns over Richie (Matt Dillon), a gruff teenager cut from the James Dean cloth who seems to spend nearly as many weekends in juvie as he does at home. Carl is less platonically infatuated with Cory (Pamela Ludwig), who starts off as a junior high school crush and gradually becomes one of the few people to whom he can relate. Richie and Carl are two of the only people in town that Carl's not butting heads with -- in the space of a day, he's unjustly dragged to the police station, quarrels with his parents, and is pummeled by his bullying classmate Mark (Vincent Spano) to reinforce that a kid who tells on another kid is a dead kid. A teenager is killed in the movie, although it has nothing to do with tattling. Carl may not be the one who takes the bullet from the kneejerk reaction of an overaggressive police officer, but a part of him dies too. His parents are devastated when he disappears, joining in on a PTA meeting to discuss how to best rein in the town's teenagers. Of course, no one seems to be looking for a solution so much as someone to take the blame. With so many of New Granada's adults corralled into one place, the kids take advantage and anarchically fulfill every one of their parents' worst expectations.
Over the Edge is fairly even-handed with most of its characters, resisting the temptation to over-demonize the parents or over-romanticize teenage rebellion. The parents aren't evil or particularly cruel -- they're just too short-sighted and inattentive to realize that they're ignoring their kids. By the same token, the teenagers aren't portrayed as heroes. (If anything, the movie takes the opposite approach and makes nearly everyone come across as violent, pill-popping, pot-puffing vandals.) At least until the climax rolls around, they don't revel in their destructive tendencies, self-inflicted or otherwise. Their actions are as empty and hollow as they are violent, and they know it.
Although its characters aren't painted with the widest variety of brushes, there's a pervasive sense of realism throughout most of the movie. (In fact, the film is based on an article screenwriter Charlie Haas
penned for the San Francisco Examiner about kids rebelling in the planned community of Foster Hills, California.) Its teenagers look like teenagers, not fresh-scrubbed, neatly groomed twentysomethings lifted off the cover of Tiger Beat, and the way they interact with one another feels natural and believable rather than contrived or deliberately scripted. This isn't a cast of overly seasoned pros, which also contributes to that sense of reality; it's the first film credit for nearly every kid in the cast, most notably a very young Vincent Spano and Matt Dillon.
The destructive, anarchic climax is what's most firmly embedded in the minds of the handful of people who have seen Over the Edge. It would've benefitted from some small amount of restraint; the filmmakers seemed determined to add in some explosions, and although I understand that the state of American auto engineering wasn't exactly at its peak in the '70s, a single bullet from a pistol to a car trunk isn't going to instantly cause it and the car next to it to suddenly burst into a fifteen megaton fireball. The concept of a literal teen rebellion is somewhat better in concept than execution, and the stringing together of these pyrotechnics comes in stark contrast to the realistic feel of the rest of the film.
Over the Edge isn't heavy on characterization, and it's not about driving a plot from one point to another; viewers who focus squarely on those aspects may come away somewhat disappointed. It's emotion that fuels the movie...exploring why people behave the way they do. Over the Edge is a compelling, deeply original film...one that's gone largely unseen, a wrong that'll hopefully be corrected with the release of this DVD.
Video: The first few minutes of the 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen video are on the rough side -- the photography's extremely grainy, the source material is riddled with specks, and the palette looks overly dingy -- but things clean up fairly nicely after that. There are still a number of small flecks of dust, and fine detail is middling, but none of this is particularly unexpected for a lower-budgeted, widely overlooked independent film shot more than a quarter-century ago. Average, and I don't mean that in a dismissive way.
Audio: The Dolby Digital mono track is fairly robust; the rock scattered throughout the movie -- including songs by Cheap Trick, The Ramones, Van Halen, and The Cars -- comes through well, and dialogue is intelligible and fairly clear throughout. The DVD is closed captioned and offers subtitles in English, French, and Spanish.
Supplements: Director Jonathan Kaplan, producer George Litto, and writers Charlie Haas and Tim Hunter contribute a great commentary track. Although the four of them have a hard time keeping the discussion going for the entire length of the film (one pause around
forty minutes in was so long that I thought they'd left), they have a lot of extremely interesting things to say: stumbling onto Matt Dillon when he was booted out of school for smoking in the boy's room, focusing on casting "real" kids instead of quasi-seasoned actors, the visual style of the film, the skittish studio's reaction in the wake of The Warriors, catching up with what the cast and crew have been up to since, detailing the differences between the original treatments and the final film... I would've liked to have heard more about what happened at Foster City, but the events that inspired Over the Edge are only mentioned in passing. A couple of the participants could've stood to be more talkative, but this is still an above-average commentary and deserves a listen.
An anamorphic widescreen theatrical trailer is also provided. The DVD includes a set of static 16x9 menus, and the movie has been divided into 25 chapter stops. The disc is packaged in a keepcase, and no insert is offered. The cover art looks nice, although it overemphasizes the fact that a couple actors in its supporting cast went onto become fairly well-known; Michael Eric Kramer, the real star of the movie, is nowhere to be seen.
Conclusion: Over the Edge isn't a movie that appears to be widely seen or frequently discussed, but it deserves to be. A natural, thoughtful film about disenfranchised youth, Over the Edge comes highly recommended.
who live there to pass the time. Plans for a bowling alley and drive-in (the movie was filmed and is set in the '70s, as if that wasn't a dead giveaway) are scrapped when the town's fortunes sputter, preferring instead to court Texas investors to support a prospective business park. With no place else to go and nothing to do, the town's teenagers turn to drugs and violence, causing the adults to view the children as an unprofitable nuisance. These parents love their children, naturally; they just aren't sure what to do with them and aren't interested enough to try to find a real solution. Not wanting to give investors the wrong impression of what New Granada has to offer, they claw blindly at any excuse to shutter the kids' one and only outlet, a cramped, almost laughably small rec center. Carl (Michael Eric Kramer) is a good kid who's started to run with the wrong crowd in New Granada. He fawns over Richie (Matt Dillon), a gruff teenager cut from the James Dean cloth who seems to spend nearly as many weekends in juvie as he does at home. Carl is less platonically infatuated with Cory (Pamela Ludwig), who starts off as a junior high school crush and gradually becomes one of the few people to whom he can relate. Richie and Carl are two of the only people in town that Carl's not butting heads with -- in the space of a day, he's unjustly dragged to the police station, quarrels with his parents, and is pummeled by his bullying classmate Mark (Vincent Spano) to reinforce that a kid who tells on another kid is a dead kid. A teenager is killed in the movie, although it has nothing to do with tattling. Carl may not be the one who takes the bullet from the kneejerk reaction of an overaggressive police officer, but a part of him dies too. His parents are devastated when he disappears, joining in on a PTA meeting to discuss how to best rein in the town's teenagers. Of course, no one seems to be looking for a solution so much as someone to take the blame. With so many of New Granada's adults corralled into one place, the kids take advantage and anarchically fulfill every one of their parents' worst expectations.
Over the Edge is fairly even-handed with most of its characters, resisting the temptation to over-demonize the parents or over-romanticize teenage rebellion. The parents aren't evil or particularly cruel -- they're just too short-sighted and inattentive to realize that they're ignoring their kids. By the same token, the teenagers aren't portrayed as heroes. (If anything, the movie takes the opposite approach and makes nearly everyone come across as violent, pill-popping, pot-puffing vandals.) At least until the climax rolls around, they don't revel in their destructive tendencies, self-inflicted or otherwise. Their actions are as empty and hollow as they are violent, and they know it.
Although its characters aren't painted with the widest variety of brushes, there's a pervasive sense of realism throughout most of the movie. (In fact, the film is based on an article screenwriter Charlie Haas
penned for the San Francisco Examiner about kids rebelling in the planned community of Foster Hills, California.) Its teenagers look like teenagers, not fresh-scrubbed, neatly groomed twentysomethings lifted off the cover of Tiger Beat, and the way they interact with one another feels natural and believable rather than contrived or deliberately scripted. This isn't a cast of overly seasoned pros, which also contributes to that sense of reality; it's the first film credit for nearly every kid in the cast, most notably a very young Vincent Spano and Matt Dillon. The destructive, anarchic climax is what's most firmly embedded in the minds of the handful of people who have seen Over the Edge. It would've benefitted from some small amount of restraint; the filmmakers seemed determined to add in some explosions, and although I understand that the state of American auto engineering wasn't exactly at its peak in the '70s, a single bullet from a pistol to a car trunk isn't going to instantly cause it and the car next to it to suddenly burst into a fifteen megaton fireball. The concept of a literal teen rebellion is somewhat better in concept than execution, and the stringing together of these pyrotechnics comes in stark contrast to the realistic feel of the rest of the film.
Over the Edge isn't heavy on characterization, and it's not about driving a plot from one point to another; viewers who focus squarely on those aspects may come away somewhat disappointed. It's emotion that fuels the movie...exploring why people behave the way they do. Over the Edge is a compelling, deeply original film...one that's gone largely unseen, a wrong that'll hopefully be corrected with the release of this DVD.
Video: The first few minutes of the 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen video are on the rough side -- the photography's extremely grainy, the source material is riddled with specks, and the palette looks overly dingy -- but things clean up fairly nicely after that. There are still a number of small flecks of dust, and fine detail is middling, but none of this is particularly unexpected for a lower-budgeted, widely overlooked independent film shot more than a quarter-century ago. Average, and I don't mean that in a dismissive way.
Audio: The Dolby Digital mono track is fairly robust; the rock scattered throughout the movie -- including songs by Cheap Trick, The Ramones, Van Halen, and The Cars -- comes through well, and dialogue is intelligible and fairly clear throughout. The DVD is closed captioned and offers subtitles in English, French, and Spanish.
Supplements: Director Jonathan Kaplan, producer George Litto, and writers Charlie Haas and Tim Hunter contribute a great commentary track. Although the four of them have a hard time keeping the discussion going for the entire length of the film (one pause around
forty minutes in was so long that I thought they'd left), they have a lot of extremely interesting things to say: stumbling onto Matt Dillon when he was booted out of school for smoking in the boy's room, focusing on casting "real" kids instead of quasi-seasoned actors, the visual style of the film, the skittish studio's reaction in the wake of The Warriors, catching up with what the cast and crew have been up to since, detailing the differences between the original treatments and the final film... I would've liked to have heard more about what happened at Foster City, but the events that inspired Over the Edge are only mentioned in passing. A couple of the participants could've stood to be more talkative, but this is still an above-average commentary and deserves a listen. An anamorphic widescreen theatrical trailer is also provided. The DVD includes a set of static 16x9 menus, and the movie has been divided into 25 chapter stops. The disc is packaged in a keepcase, and no insert is offered. The cover art looks nice, although it overemphasizes the fact that a couple actors in its supporting cast went onto become fairly well-known; Michael Eric Kramer, the real star of the movie, is nowhere to be seen.
Conclusion: Over the Edge isn't a movie that appears to be widely seen or frequently discussed, but it deserves to be. A natural, thoughtful film about disenfranchised youth, Over the Edge comes highly recommended.
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