When I was in my sophomore year of high school we had a pretty interesting homeroom session now and then. For those not in the know, homeroom was where everyone met to get counted as present or absent, and you could goof off for about half hour or so and chat with friends or get that last bit of homework you neglected last night, or cram hard for a test or quiz.

Be honest, you all did it. :D

Anyway, one May morning the homeroom was packed a bit more than usual and there was a projector set up and we inwardly groaned because that usually meant we were gonna see an “educational” film of some sort, like how to be clean, or the life of a bumblebee, or something like that. So the teacher there says we need to see this movie and he got it from a friend he knew and he had managed to get us out of regular classes that morning to show it…

Okay, that’s interesting. We sat down and hushed and watched the movie.

That movie was “Over the Edge” and its an overlooked gem of a late 70s film about a group of inner city kids forced to live in a gated community away from the city, and the trouble they bring to the table. See, this movie was based on an actual event written up in a 1973 San Francisco Examiner issue called “Mousepacks: Kids on a Crime Spree” in which uprooted kids brought vandalism, drugs and violence to Foster City, California…which at the time was about to sprout Silicon Valley as we know it today. But the kids, being pulled away from what they loved in the big city, didn’t fare too well so they exploded in rage and took out frustrations on the small town. And this is the crux of “Over the Edge”.

A large group of families have moved from the big city of Denver to a planned community away from it all and unfortunately they didn’t take into account the children – because no one ever thinks of the children………… as drugs, fights, vandalism, extortion and attempted murder start blossoming outwards, its up to parents, the police, and teachers to try and bring about order outta chaos.

And it doesn’t work. Not even a little bit.

I don’t wanna give away too much but the movie really impressed me. I watched these kids on screen trashing a library, taking acid and having trips, having unprotected sex, and sadly being killed and im all of 15 years old. But it DID something to me. When the movie was over, a lot of kids just chuckled and got up and left but I sat there watching the blank screen, thinking of what I’d seen and heard and………… I guess it didn’t make sense to me. Why kids do that. Why they vandalize, take drugs, get themselves killed…. Was life so bad for them that they felt they needed to try to rebel, to revolt, with such destructive, deadly consequences?

I thought about my own life… uprooted from a big city, Nashville, and stuck in a small town in Ohio, Elyria… I missed some of that big city life, you bet…………. But I never once EVER thought about tearing something up or hitting something with a baseball bat, or punching someone in the face, or ANY of that shit… and this movie explained why very nicely. Even today…as outdated as it is, I would say this film should be REQUIRED VIEWING in any high school in the world…

yeah, kids get BORED, we get it… when we didn’t have the internet, or video games, trust me, there wasn’t a LOT we could do… so I read books, and I went to summer camp, and I joined the boy Scouts, so I was always busy. :D I didn’t have time to think of drugs, vandalism, fights, or anything like that…

Im sad when I think of all the kids who didn’t make it like me. When I was in my early 20s…it COULD have been me… I was hanging out with the wrong crowd, and they did a lotta acid and got into fights and sometimes we would all hang out in the parking lot of Hills Dept. store along with a multitude of muscle cars and women. That got to be my Friday thing for a while. But then I got a job and that all changed…I was a responsible adult again and I dropped those kids like bad habits.

But it was “Over the Edge” that convinced me that, hey, I gotta be a grown up. So what if im uprooted and feeling lost, or I don’t know what to do, or where to go…. It doesn’t mean I needed to be a rotten child or get a police record. If only a LOT more kids had seen this movie, I just wonder where theyd be today. Even now, thinking about my old gang, I looked up one of them just as an afterthought and he’s dead.

Of a drug overdose at 28.

Hell…… that coulda been ME.

So…thank god I saw this movie when I did… seeing it again on HBO a few years was literally a wake up call for me. :D it made me realize…. Slow down…life is precious. How we spend it is all to us. :D

(Quick note: this is actor Matt Dillon’s first film appearance before “Tex”, “Little Darlings”, and “the Outsiders” and he was AWESOME. Also I think one of Vincent Spano’s first performances… these kids were great. :D PLUS: a KICK-ASS soundtrack featuring Van Halen, Cheap Trick, Jimi Hendrix, The Cars and the Ramones. the late GREAT Kurt Cobain of Nirvana said of this movie, "Over the Edge pretty much defined my whole personality. It was really cool. Total anarchy." I'd say it did the same for me too. seeing anarchy in a bunch of kids was the shot in the arm i needed NOT to wage anarchy.)

Definitely give this film a watch. Sadly the film's release was bad timing. "the Warriors" and "the Wanderers" had just come out and producers were worried about showing something like this around the same time... so it only got limited viewings and in not many movie houses.

Which is a damned shame because i think this would have saved a LOT of lives...........



FULL MOVIE HERE (With ads)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OF6sqSTOYVM