At first I had River’s Edge confused with The Lost
Boys, which came out a year later, in 1987. Both are set in California
towns with a great deal of wild scenic beauty. (River’s Edge was shot in
the Sacramento area, while The Lost Boys famously takes place in Santa
Cruz, renamed Santa Carla for filming purposes.) Both involve packs of wild
young men (and a few young women) who decisively turn their backs on
conventional middle-class morality. Both
showcase fractured family units, and give juicy oldster roles to Hollywood
veterans (Dennis Hopper, Barnard Hughes) while also featuring attractive young
newcomers (Crispin Glover, Keanu Reeves, Jason Patric, Kiefer Sutherland). Both
contain material that can surely be considered disturbing. Both were shot on
low budgets, but made a fair amount of money at the box office.
One big difference, though: The Lost Boys (now a
musical hit on Broadway) is about vampires. The film’s supernatural
element, along with some particularly eccentric characters—like the
vampire-hunting Frog brothers—ensure that audiences will chuckle as well as
shiver. In River’s Edge, though,
there’s no such release from the film’s built-up tension. It opens with an
androgynous looking pre-teen flinging a doll into a river. (It turns out he’s
figured out a great way to torment his little sister.) From there we move to
another spot at the river’s edge, where a young man stands shell-shocked over
the naked corpse of the co-ed he’s just strangled to death, because (as he
later explained) she was talking shit.
Though the film’s main characters are mostly male, their
treatment of girls and women is central to the story. Some, like the
hyperkinetic Layne (Glover) seem to have no use at all for the female of the
species. Layne is overtly excited by the killing, and takes it as his mission
to protect the killer. The physically and mentally wounded druggie played by
Hopper cherishes a life-sized sex doll who eerily resembles the dead girl.
Reeves’ character, Matt, is the only central male figure who makes a choice to do
the right thing, though this leads to him being harassed—and accused of
participating in the crime—by a particularly nasty local cop.
Authority figures in River’s Edge don’t come off much
better than the young. There’s that malicious cop, first of all, who is clearly
a bully and a sadist. A youngish high school social studies teacher thinks he’s
reaching his young charges by romanticizing the political activism of the
Sixties, but he doesn’t have a clue as to what they’re thinking. Most of the film’s young men don’t seem to
have intact families, or any families at all. Matt’s mother, Madeleine, is an
attractive nurse who does show some concern about the welfare of her brood, but
she’s also shacking up with an idler who clearly thinks the kids are a
nuisance. Madeleine, like the other parents we see, can merely helplessly shrug
her shoulders when her youngsters stay out till all hours, or fail to come home
at all.
Reeves’ Matt, as the one young man with something of a
conscience, is rewarded by the opportunity to hook up with the prettiest of the
gang’s gal pals, played by Ione Skye. (This was her first film, and—as the
daughter of the singer Donovan—she was still using her surname, Leitch, in her
billing. It would be two years before she became everyone’s dream girl in Say
Anything.) But even the nicest of the young people in this film are not so
very nice. If you like your films dark, this one’s for you!
