cwbellor
When you're a confused teenager who has just killed your girlfriend, sometimes the only person you can count on is George McFly. Of course, I'm talking about Crispin Glover. Crispy steals the show here as Layne. His character is a winning combination of brains and good intentions. He is a true original with his slacker initiative and punk patriotism. This may be the 80s, but as true blue as Cookie Crisp is he is not going to play by Reagan's rules. To this bug-riding burnout, the only thing more ridiculous than conformity is no doubt, gloves with fingers.In an uncertain world, he is certain of one thing and that is the bond between two delinquent buddies. Crispin knows that he's got to look out for his friend. Unfortunately, Keannu doesn't know how to be a team player and that's where the main conflict of this film lies. When faced with a dead naked girl, do you do the right thing or do you do a half assed job of hiding the body? Dennis Hopper is a Fecking delight in this film as a Hopping crazy drug dealer with an affection for inflatable babes. But it's the younger generation of angstniks that shine in this movie and Crispin's leather jacket alone shines brighter than any bratpacker could ever hope to.
Veronica6
A lot of people don't realize that this is based on a true story. I knew and went to jr high and high school with the people involved. This actually happened during our first year of high school. The characters were exaggerated a bit. I remember the kids coming back to school and talking about seeing a dead body and poking it with a stick. The girl who was killed was actually a very quiet and sweet girl who happened to befriend the wrong person. A lot of people were afraid of him and thought he was weird and avoided him. He wanted to be more than friends, she wasn't interested so he killed her (so the story goes). Google Marcy Conrad to get the real story. For me knowing what really happened and seeing this movie don't jive but overall it was a decent movie.
zetes
An odd film about teenagers and how they deal with murder. The short answer to how they deal with it: they don't. Daniel Roebuck strangles his girlfriend to death after an argument, and when his stoner friends find out, they go examine the body. Unwilling to turn their friend in, they form a silent pact to keep it a secret. Some feel uneasy about that, but they're pretty emotionally disaffected. Crispin Glover plays Roebuck's biggest defender, Keanu Reeves the teen who eventually cracks under pressure and Ione Skye Reeves' girlfriend. Dennis Hopper plays the gang's nutjob drug dealer who has a special relationship with a blow-up doll. Joshua Miller, who would turn in an extremely memorable performance as a child vampire in the following year's Near Dark, plays Reeves' younger brother, a 12 year-old who idolizes the older teens. Miller probably gives my favorite performance in the film. Hopper is also fine, though this is pretty much the same kind of role he had in Blue Velvet, which was made around the same time. All the other actors, though, are pretty lousy. Glover can be fun at times, but you can't let him anywhere near anything even semi-serious - he's too goofy to handle it. And Reeves, while playing the type of character he would eventually excel at in the Bill & Ted movies, is very weak. Still, with all of the film's flaws, it's so unusual that it's never less than interesting.
Vornoff-3
In many ways, this movie defined what I was not at the time – suburban, stoned, a metalhead – and it was an opportunity for me to feel moral superiority over "normal" American teenagers. But, I think that I was drawn in on a similar level to the movies I identified with more closely from the punk world ("Repo Man," "Sid & Nancy," "Suburbia"), which were themselves fairly critical adult statements about youthful apathy. This movie offers a kind of uncertain hope in the form of Keanu Reeves' character (and he's never been better), but in the end we begin to wonder if he did the right thing for the right reasons, or sort of blundered into it the way Crispin Glover blunders into a fanatical dedication to being wrong. It does remain thoughtful, if scary, and effective on other levels as well, including humor, oddly enough.
AD
