Based on a true incident: a teenage boy strangles his girlfriend ("She was talking shit") and shows off the body to his friends, who fail to do the morally and legally "right thing." What's the matter with today's youth, anyway? The "incident" itself is all right -- well-staged, matter-of-fact, creepily believable. But what then? Rather slow going, that's what. And rather aimless going as well -- though not out of any empathy with aimless youth. The introduction of a paranoid, drug-peddling, one-legged recluse (Dennis Hopper), who once killed his own girlfriend and now keeps a life-sized inflatable doll for company, is a propulsively "movie-ish" move; as is the "suspense" device of a precocious twelve-year-old plotting the death of his older brother to avenge a bloody nose. But this sort of thing inflates the sociological data -- already an extreme case to begin with -- to the point of irrelevance, and past the point of shockingness. The self-anointed teen "leader" is potentially an interesting (and even an amusing) character -- self-dramatizing, forever infuriated by his unreliable disciples, unable to command the respect he feels he deserves, unable to perform up to his imagined abilities -- but Crispin Glover overplays the role, with flaring mascaraed eyes and warped-record voice, like a psycho in a horror film: like Jack Nicholson, say, in The Shining. Other, smaller details are overarticulated too: the "caring" high-school teacher in the wire-rimmed specs of the Sixties protest movement, or the brown-nosing soprano nerd of the class, or the murderer's totally out-of-character and uncorroborated "confession." A movie that sets itself up as a scold (of other youth movies as much as of youth themselves) will want to keep a cooler head. Tabloid sensationalism, even when (or especially when) smothered with slice-of-life naturalism, opens up such a movie to a charge of hypocrisy. Directed by Tim Hunter. (1987) — Duncan Shepherd
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