The Survival of Dana Reviews

Taking "after school special" material into prime time, The Survival of Dana is a by-the-numbers cautionary drama cast with familiar television faces of the day along with a few young actors who would find greater fame in the following decade. Robert Carradine was well into his twenties, but still had the countenance of a buck-toothed adolescent, so he appears as the leader of "The Roadrunners," a gang of suburban delinquents who sport matching satin jackets and tool around in a van looking for trouble. Judge Reinhold later made a career playing genial everymen, and, as a result, is hard to take seriously as Bear, an inarticulate and violent kid who feels ready to "break like ice" at any moment. As the new kid in town, Melissa Sue Anderson is stiff and uninteresting, falling back on her blind-girl shtick from Little House on the Prairie whenever she's called upon to express strong emotion. She's the focus of The Survival of Dana, but each member of the gang gets a heart-rending scene to shed light on their troubles at home and why they've turned rotten. There's nothing new here that hasn't been addressed before or since, and director Jack Starrett does a perfunctory job in telling this familiar story. By the end of the film, these upper-middle-class white kids find out exactly why the thug life is a bad idea: It brings one in contact with Mexicans, whose commitment to crime is deeper than the kick-starved Roadrunners. This weak melodrama gained a second chance at life when it was released to videotape as On the Edge: The Survival of Dana.