Over the Edge (1979)

The best “blow up the high school” movie ever made. The kids in Over the Edge are bored out of their minds living in New Grenada, a punishingly dull planned community isolated in the featureless Colorado plains. The grown-ups have big plans for New Grenada as a site for industrial parks, car dealerships, quiet neighborhoods, and high property resale values. Just one problem: There’s nothing there for their kids to do, except for burglary, drugs, and vandalism. The law tries to get tough, but it only makes things worse. It all comes to a head when the town’s parents meet in the school auditorium one night to discuss the kiddie crime problem while their kids gather outside like an army ready to rip the place apart.

Most juvenile delinquent films don’t age well. They tend to go down in film history as kitschy, retro fun, often with some naive social message attached. Over the Edge is an exception to this. It’s a powerhouse drama that plays just as hauntingly well in 2009 as it might have in 1979. A lot of the credit here goes to the perfect casting. Director Jonathan Kaplan and producer George Litto didn’t want a typical “youth cast” of polished 25 year old professionals playing 15 year olds. They wanted realism, so they sent talent scouts out to high schools around the New York City area in search of real kids. The schools always trotted out their talent show winners for auditions, but the scouts were a lot more interested in talking to the stoners who hung out in the parking lot—actor Matt Dillon was discovered for this film as he was being hustled into the principal’s office for smoking in the boys restroom—and that’s who they hired.

Bad timing killed this one in its original release. Street gang movies The Warriors and Boulevard Nights suffered bad publicity that same year after shootings and stabbings at a few theaters and Orion Pictures got antsy about releasing another youth violence film. So they wrote this off, sweeping it under the rug by half-heartedly promoting it with a bizarre poster that sold it as a HORROR movie and then barely releasing it. Over the Edge didn’t start building a good reputation until two years later when it was screened in the Word of Mouth film series of overlooked movies at the classy Joseph Papp Public Theater in New York City. Frequent cable TV showings in the 80s further stoked a devoted cult following.