I’d heard Super Dark Times compared to Stand By Me, but it reminds me more of a much grimmer movie that came out the same year (1986), Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge.
Known primarily as a launching pad for a young Keanu Reeves, it also came with barking mad performances from Dennis Hopper and Crispin Glover.
All three movies speak volumes about adolescent friendships put under stress by the presence of a dead body.
The resemblance to Stand By Me seems deliberate. At first glance, Super Dark Times appears to take place in one of those Stephen King-like clouds of sunny nostalgia based some time in the 1990s.
Boys on their bicycles, clunky portable phones with Walkie Talkie antennas, and a TV appearance by Bill Clinton anchor us firmly in the appropriate decade, much like Donnie Darko’s sister declaring her intent to vote for Michael Dukakis.
Zach (Owen Campbell) and Josh (Charlie Tahan) are high school best buds whiling away their virgin years in a small rural town that looks Norman Rockwell on the surface, with a noticeable David Lynch underbelly.
Their lives are mostly innocent fun punctuated with declarations of impending boy horniness until a terrible mishap claims the life of Daryl (Max Talisman), a pain-in-the-ass acquaintance whom no one wanted to hang out with in the first place.
Everyone agrees it was an accident that led to Daryl’s bleeding to death, and the decision is quickly made to bury his stupid body and play dumb.
Indeed, it’s the day-to-day mundanity of the average teen that director Ken Phillips and writers Luke Piotrowski and Ben Collins, get exactly right, to the point where we actually care about Zach’s budding relationship with dream girl Allison (Elizabeth Cappucino).
However, this isn’t a John Hughes film, either. Zach cannot be redeemed by love and Josh loses his way entirely.
Once the closest of friends, Zach and Josh now view each other with increasing suspicion, that builds fiendishly low and slow.
Josh becomes angry and distant while Zach can’t sleep due to vivid nightmares about their dark deed.
The inability of friends to trust each other with a hideous secret dooms the relationship and leads to an unexpectedly bloody finale, one that slays any notion of Super Dark Times taking place in a benign Stephen King universe.
More like Dateline with Keith Morrison.
SDT is a superb, riveting thriller as well as a brutally harsh coming-of-age story, with young protagonists that have yet to develop a moral center.
Enthusiastic recommendation from this corner. I ate it up like Junior Mints.
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