River's Edge

1986 teen comedy

Rating: 15/20

Plot: A high school doofus named Samson kills his girlfriend and leaves her naked body by the titular edge of a river. His buddy Layne tries to rally the troops to protect him while some of his friends, including Matt, decide to defy Layne, do the right thing, and go to the cops. A friendly neighborhood acid casualty married to a blow-up doll also gets involved.

Crispin Glover, Dennis Hopper, Keanu Reeves, and Donovan's daughter? There's no way this one could miss. For fans of the magic of Mr. Glover, this will please as he is at his most unglued, arriving too-wide-eyed in a VW bug and flashing all these weird finger motions. He's intensity incarnate with fingerless gloves and parachute pants and a stocking cap hiding hair that more than likely embarrasses him today. Hell, it almost embarrasses me, and I'm just an innocent bystander. Keanu Reeves gives his typical performance, and matched with Crispin's, some times in the same VW bug, it's almost too much for one man to handle. Then you've got Dennis Hopper playing one of his more deranged characters, and that's saying something. He gets a lovely scene where he slow-dances with a sex doll, compares his sister to a "God damn hippopotamus," and gets to say cool things like "I ate so much pussy in those days, my beard looked like a glazed doughnut." And I loved this bit of dialogue:

Samson: You're a psycho, aren't you?
Peck (Hopper): No, I'm normal. I know she's a doll. Isn't that right, Ellie?

I also loved a scene where Dennis Hopper's character is on his porch and looking around nervously. He enters the house and spots Samson standing with a cat. He tells Samson that he had him worried. Samson says, "Look what I found. We can get it stoned," and then fake-attacks the sex doll with it while Hopper freaks out. It's brilliant. Seriously, when anybody is capable of drawing attention to his or her character while Crispin Glover is doing what he does here is pretty amazing. Other chunks of nutty dialogue ("He went to buy an egg," all the "You eat me" echo fun, etc.) make it clear that this is a disturbingly black comedy more than anything else. And this scene at a phone booth:

Girl: Who do I call?
Other girl: The police, I guess.
Girl: I don't know the number.
Other girl: Call the operator and find out.
Girl: I don't know what to say.
Other girl: I'll dial and you talk. [Dials 0]

It's almost too funny for a storyline this dark, and although I can see how somebody would take that for criticism, I don't mean it that way. I laughed a few times and was enormously entertained by the performances. A bonus for kid-actor Yuzo Nishihara and his amazing nunchuck skills as the oddly-named Moko. This bit of random nunchucking puts me one step closer to completing a nunchuck trifecta for the summer. A and nd you also get Keanu humming the Mission Impossible theme as well as a Keanu Reeves sex scene with Donovan's daughter which I watched seventeen times while playing Donovan's "Atlantis" loudly enough for my neighbors to hear. This is one to watch with your pants off, friends.