Disturbing Behavior: When Good Teens Go Crazy

Reviewed by Vickie Reichardt, Cinema Geek

Vick's Rating:

= There's two hours of my life I'll never see again. Is it too late to ask for my money back?
= They could have done SO much better. Wait for the video.
= Not bad at all. Some solid work.
= Wow! I'm very impressed. I might go see this one again.
= For the love of all that is good and kind in the world, what an amazing movie!!!

Directed by David Nutter

Cast:
Steve..........Jason Marsden
Rachel..........Katie Holmes
Gavin.............Nick Stahl
Caldicott....Bruce Greenwood
Newberry......William Sadler

Katie Holmes deserves better than this. I'm starting with those words because they echoed in my brain for the duration of this somewhat disappointing blip on the teen-thriller radar screen. It bothered me. I was troubled. I'll try to move on.

"Disturbing Behavior," clearly cashing in on the "let's put a bunch of attractive young stars in a movie and make them shriek" formula that made the "Scream" films so successful, wants to be scary but isn't. Set in the picturesque enclave of Cradle Bay (cue the soothing warmth), the film follows new kid in town Steve (James Marsden) as he tries to adjust to life in this seemingly idyllic community. Steve has emotional baggage--his older brother committed suicide eight months earlier and the move to Cradle Bay is meant as a "fresh start"--but whatever issues he might have on his own soon pale in comparison to the bizarre goings-on among his new peers.

You see, something is amiss at the local high school, as directionless stoner Gavin (Nick Stahl) points out to the newcomer. The squeaky-clean A-list students--the jocks, the cheerleaders, the honor roll teens (nicknamed The Blue Ribbons)--are beginning to act strangely. Very strangely. Like having a bake sale and then committing murder. And no one (read: the authorities) seems to care. Not only that, but delinquent students are being signed up for the "program" designed by the smarmy Dr. Caldicott (Bruce Greenwood) that begat these Stepford Teens in the first place. The result is a band of mind-altered teenagers who are all smiley and nice until their hromones kick in and a flaw in their software sends them on rampages that result in serious bodly harm for someone else.

Teamed with Gavin and Gavin's wrong-side-of-the-tracks-but-still-beautiful friend Rachel (Katie Holmes), Steve sets out to expose the good doctor's evildoings before the entire under-21 population is lobotomized.

Sure sounds good, doesn't it?

Alas, what could have been a great movie winds up being painfully mediocre. There are several problems with it, not the least of which are the humongous plotholes through which you could drive a busload of homicidal math club students. There are plot points that are glossed over (what's the whole deal with the brother who died?) or ignored (doesn't Rachel have parents?) and as they accumulated I found myself preoccupied with trying to figure them out. There even comes a point in the movie where one character says to another, "I'm just making this s**t up as I go along." Art perhaps imitating life for the filmmakers? Add to that a gymnasium full of really bad stereotypes that populate the screen (bespectacled school nerds wearing bow ties (!), disfigured mental patients drooling and screaming and generally behaving in an all-too-creepy fashion) and the movie loses any credibility it might have had before the opening title sequence. For a film like this one to work, the thought that this could actually happen is what should scare an audience, but the cartoonish characters make that impossible.

Save for the three leads, who were all decent but certainly not spectacular, the acting here is a little...okay, a LOT...on the cheesy side. I kept expecting Bruce Greenwood to begin twirling the ends of his moustache in a dastardly manner (just to drive home the point that he's the bad guy) and the young actors playing the high schoolers made me laugh out loud on more than one occasion. Especially entertaining were their efforts to convey the "short circuiting" of their characters' brains which resulted in the funniest twitches and convulsions I've seen onscreen in a while. It's sad when the best performance comes from an actor playing a flashback. Ethan Embry ("Can't Hardly Wait") appears ever so briefly--and without dialogue--as Steve's late older brother, and does a better job in the two minutes he's present than much of the cast do in some ninety minutes of celluloid.

You know, I don't ask much from movies. Just good acting and a good story. I want comedies to make me laugh, dramas to make me cry and thrillers to give me at least a faint trace of the heebie-jeebies. Unfortunately, "Disturbing Behavior" fails to qualify. One of the film's tag lines declares "there's nothing more frightening than perfection." I beg to differ.

Vickie, a self-confessed movie addict, has spent the last few years working at an entertainment magazine in Canada. When she's not toiling away at her computer in the office, she's toiling away at her computer at home-- hacking away at unfinished screenplays and planning her acceptance speech for the Academy Awards.