Oh, Trevor.

Played by Scott Wallace, Trevor is the main character and the narrator of the 1976 film, Step Over The Edge.  Trevor is a young Christian who gets involved with something called the Vanguard Program.  In Vanguard, young people are taken to the wilderness and are forced to go on hikes and climb mountains and brave rapids, all so that they can then spend three days alone with their thoughts and a journal.  Trevor, writing in his journal, informs us that he knows that it’s weird for a guy to keep a diary but he’s glad that he did.

At the start of the program, Trevor was a bit of a jerk.  He didn’t like any of the other campers.  None of them measured up to his standards of what a mature and intelligent believer should be.  The girls were either too giggly or too insecure or too popular.  They either cared too much or cared too little.  Either way, Trevor didn’t think much of them.  As for the other boys, Trevor judged most of them to be idiots who were always either complaining or making stupid jokes.  Trevor was especially hard on CJ, who Trevor judged to be too close to his mother and a “loser.”  When CJ didn’t want to rappel down a mountain, Trevor acted like it was a personal affront.  When another camper nearly died in the rapids, Trevor acted like it was everyone’s fault but his own.

Fortunately, Trevor spends his three days alone thinking about his behavior and staring at the sunset and he suddenly comes to realize that he was indeed being too judgmental.  The film is only 65 minutes long and Trevor doesn’t actually go off by himself until about 55 minutes in.  So, that means that the viewer has to sit through nearly an hour of Trevor being a jerk just to get to ten minutes of Trevor having a sudden epiphany.  Watching the film, I got the feeling that perhaps the Vanguard Program was a real thing and this movie was meant to be a bit of infomercial for it.  The film seemed to be saying, “Look at what we were able to do for even this jerk!”

To be honest, horror films have pretty much ruined me when it comes to viewing films like this through innocent eyes.  Whenever I see any movie that features a bunch of teenagers camping in the wilderness, I automatically start looking for Jason Voorhees hiding behind a tree.  Step Over The Edge features a perfectly innocent scene in which everyone sits around a campfire and talks.  Rather than appreciating the fact that everyone was opening up, I was sitting there waiting for a monster to come jumping out of the woods.

Step Over The Edge is a low-budget film with grainy cinematography and imperfect performances.  The film’s message, which essentially came down to “Don’t judge others,” was a positive one but, in the end, the film really only succeeded in making me happy that I’ve never been one for camping.

Seriously, you never know what might be hiding out there.