Disturbing Behavior (1998)

Well, as it turns out Katie was saving her REALLY Disturbing Behavior for later...

Disturbing Behavior (1998) Oh oh! It seems something strange is happening to the kids at Steve's new school. The "bad kids" are transforming one by one into the Blue Ribbon bunch, overachievers with a slight penchant for violence and murder. Can Steve (James Marsden) and new girlfriend Rachel (Katie Holmes-TV's Dawson's Creek) maintain their identities long enough to solve the mystery? This one can't get past the fact that it is cribbed from so many other movies (The Stepford Children, Strange Behavior). Also, though Marsden and Holmes are okay, there's not enough character development here for them to sink their teeth into. The most telling factor is that the distribution company believed they had a dog on their hands and chopped this down to a bare bones 74 minutes. This does keep the film moving along, but a little more character development or a few more "quiet moments" might have helped flesh this out. Character actor William Sadler (Die Hard 2) spices things up as a brighter-than-he-looks school janitor, but he can't save this one. Skip it. Also with Nick Stahl, Bruce Greenwood, and Steve Railsback. December 26, 2008

High school horror?

Loner Steve Clark (James Marsden) and his family have just moved from Chicago to an idyllic village in the northwest. As he starts school, Steve finds the usual cliques, the strangest being a group called "the Blue Ribbons;" they're the handsomest jocks and most beautiful co-eds and seem perfect but have a bad habit of beating people up - and getting away with it. Steve is befriended by a stoner (Nick Stahl) and a punk girl (Katie Holmes) who share his suspicions about the Blue Ribbons. Can they solve the mystery - in time?!

First of all, James Marsden is way too good-looking, charming, and old to play the outsider teen. He's extremely likeable and sincere, however, and was the only reason I kept watching to the end, hoping this confusing mess would make sense. I guess it did have a plot, but it was so poorly written that it's pretty laughable. There was nothing in the story that seemed believeable. The teen and adult characters were all stereotypes, the Marsden and Holmes characters suddenly became brilliant detectives and figured out an evil plan to turn the student body into Stepford Teens, and zombies, it seems, are really dumb and apparently no one will notice if they all disappear.

For a so-called "thriller," this movie was not suspenseful at all, just silly and amateurish. (But James Marsden looks good.) September 8, 2008

C'mon Ray Ray, give up the play for ol' Chuck!

Disturbing Behavior is essentially an American adaptation of the classic A Clockwork Orange. Where juvenile delinquints were targeted before, now it's every kid who doesn't exude the perfect behavior.

The movie begins with a teenage couple making out at an overlooking bluff. When the girl gets a little too frisky, the young man tells her that he "needs his fluids". When she doesn't follow his suggestion, his eyes glow slightly, and then he snaps her neck. To make matters worse, the local police happen upon the scene, and at least one of the cops is complicit. Unfortunately for them, this is all seen by a local kid named Gavin (Nick Stahl), who has an inexplicably verbose vocabulary for a high school student.

Meanwhile, the perfect WASP family is moving into quiet Cradle Bay, a community where the most happening place is a Yogurt Shoppe, and the most exciting news is usually related to a bake sale somewhere. Steve (James Marsden) is the clean-cut, go-getter, and like the rest of his family, he is recently mourning the loss of his older brother. At his new school, however, he'll soon be mourning the fact that the social divide is far beyond most high schools; it's the "Greasers" versus the "Soc'ias", but to the Nth degree. In the new school, as explained by Gavin and an albino friend nicknamed UV, it's "Motorheads", "Microgeeks", "Skaters", and "Blue Ribbons", a group of school do-gooders, who are just a little too perfect, a little too 1950s.

Steve soon sees Rachel (Katie Holmes), a beautiful outcast who ridiculously insists on using the word "razor" as a slang term. Katie Holmes may have never been better looking in a movie. Soon enough he's distracted, however, by one of the Blue Ribbon kids going berzerk and beating two other high school kids, even ripping out a nose-ring, because his attraction to Rachel was too much to handle. It seems that when Blue Ribbons have emotional or sexual attraction they're not quite up to Blue Ribbon standards.

Within two days, Steve notices that one of the rougher students, who recently got in a fight with one of the Blue Ribbons, has suddenly become a straight-laced Blue Ribbon. It's just a bit too odd for Steve, or anyone else's tastes. He hears about Gavin's theory that the kids at school are being brainwashed and/or lobotomized by the school therapist Dr. Caldicott, and he meets Mr. Newberry, an insane janitor at the school.

To prove his theories, Gavin sneaks into school with Steve one evening, and learns that Gavin's parents are planning on enrolling him into one of the weekend retreats that has helped, maybe even created, the rest of the Blue Ribbons. What happens next shocks everyone.

As a result, Steve and Rachel realize they must fight the rest of the school, the growing school conspiracy, the Blue Ribbons, and what seems like the entire town in order to find out what has been happening. It's a race to not only save themselves, but also friends and family who may be affected. Disturbing Behavior is a well-made adaptation, with great acting, and a few interesting twists to keep the viewers guessing. January 30, 2008

ONE OF MARSDEN'S BEST

If a "spooky" movie is supposed to give you the creeps, this film does the job. Lots of strange characters from police officers to students.
James Marsden, who is excellent in everything he does, plays the hero Steve. Nick Stahl is great here but greater in Carnivale.
Good acting all around. Steve Railsback and Bruce Greenwood are standouts, and the actor who played the janitor was a scene stealer!
Great surprise ending too. A good fun movie with just enough suspense and fear to make you love it! September 21, 2007

Underrated

High School! Yay! If you're like me, you loathe the very mention of "High School". The principal in charge of my school ran the place like a prison. No pop machines. No soft drinks or candy allowed. Need to use the bathroom? Tough. Go when you're walking to your next class. I won't even get into the fact that when I turned eighteen at the beginning of my last year I could legally smoke cigarettes yet for some reason wasn't allowed to even OUTSIDE of the building without receiving some sort of punishment. Of course, after the warden moved on a few years later, the kids there had pop machines, candy machines, and could leave for lunch whenever they felt like it. I'm not bitter about it, really. It's so far in the past that I laugh about my experiences there whenever anyone mentions high school. Which, fortunately, isn't often. My encounters with high school these days largely come to me through movies. It looks like kids today have to go through the same crud I endured years ago. I feel for them. My advice to these poor souls: gut it out. Life gets much, much better in a few years.

None of this nonsense has much to do about anything except to serve as a rather lame introduction to my review of David Nutter's 1998 film "Disturbing Behavior". The movie introduces us to Steve Clark (James Marsden), a young man moving into the small town of Cradle Bay and trying to navigate his way through the social hell that is high school. He quickly meets up with two important characters: Gavin Strick (Nick Stahl) and Rachel Wagner (Katie Holmes). These two kids definitely look the part of outsiders. Strick mumbles a lot and has that old soul look, and Wagner dresses in black and sulks all over the place. Still, the two provide our hero with plenty of information about the various goings on in Cradle Bay High School. In one scene early on in the movie, Strick sits with Clark in the cafeteria and provides a quick run down of the various social cliques. The stoners, car lovers, nerds...you get the idea, except he has different names for them. Gavin makes sure to point out one group in particular, a collection of neatly groomed youngsters he calls "Blue Ribbons". They're the upright, popular kids who also excel in school.

But something is horribly, terribly wrong with the members of the Blue Ribbon gang. Let's call them a cult, actually. As Steve Clark soon learns, the town fell under the sway of one Dr. Edgar Endicott (Bruce Greenwood). He developed a plan, a behavior modification plan, that promises to transform troubled kids into straight arrows. Sounds great, doesn't it? Most of the parents in Cradle Bay think so. The Blue Ribbon cult keeps getting bigger and bigger as more kids fall into the orbit of Endicott's program. There's just one LITTLE problem with the new in crowd. The members have a tendency to erupt into cyclones of violence at the drop of the hat, usually when something excites those darn teenage hormones. Witness the carnage that takes place in a supermarket in one scene, and I think you'll agree that something isn't right here. Clark launches an investigation, spurred on by Gavin's sudden conversion into a Blue Ribboner, and what he finds isn't pretty. Endicott, with the help of Officer Cox (Steve Railsback), is performing bizarre experiments in the field of neurology. I think it's safe to say that brain surgery, behavior modification, and raging hormones lead to one heck of a conclusion.

"Disturbing Behavior" is a lot of fun. The movie achieves heights of ridiculousness, especially during the grand finale, but that didn't stop me from grabbing on to this sucker's horns and riding it until the gruesome end. Let's run over the positives real quick. One, Katie Holmes. She's smoking hot in this film. I've always had a soft spot in my heart for her, but she attains heights of foxiness here I never imagined. Simply gorgeous. It's painful to think she's glued to Mr. Xenu in real life. Two, Nick Stahl is a really good actor. He can take something as goofy as "Disturbing Behavior" and sell it to the audience. Third, what's up with Hollywood and janitors? Between the guy in "The Breakfast Club" and the janitor here that lends a helping hand to Steve and his buddies, Dorien Newberry (William Sadler), it's obvious Tinseltown has a love affair with those pursuing a career in the custodial arts (a nod to Bender there). Four, and finally, it's nice to see Ethan Embry and Katharine Isabelle in small supporting roles. Now let's peruse the negatives. There aren't any, really, unless you count the film's short runtime. "Disturbing Behavior" clocks in at a paltry eighty-four minutes, including credits. Ouch!

The "Disturbing Behavior" DVD contains mucho supplements. We get a music video from The Flys, a commentary track featuring director David Nutter, an alternate ending, and eleven deleted scenes. That's a lot of deleted scenes! They should've just plugged them back into the movie to up the runtime. Anyway, I enjoyed this movie immensely. I remember when it came out back in the late 1990s, and I remember it tanking fast, so I put off seeing it until now thinking that it must have really stunk. The returns were so low that David Nutter has done nothing but television work since the film came out. Well, the critics and theater audiences were wrong; it's a great, entertaining horror flick filled with violence and heavy-handed messages about social conformity. In other words, it's high school with Katie Holmes. By the way, did I mention Katie Holmes is smoking hot? Good. I give this movie five stars. I give Katie ten stars. Good flick. May 27, 2007

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