Customer Reviews

Disturbing Behavior

5 star:		(49)
4 star:		(31)
3 star:		(21)
2 star:		(16)
1 star:		(21)

 

 

...of what can happen when a movie is created in a studio conference room. The sheer idiocy of what MGM did to director David Nutter's "Disturbing Behavior" is paralleled only by Miramax's hack job on "54". Good job, guys. We really didn't need to know anything about Steve's (James Marsden) brother's suicide did we? Sure, it would have given the film a whole new dimension, and would have made Steve's bond with Gavin (Nick Stahl) maybe mean just a little bit more within the context of the story. But, out it goes. And, hey, who needs that whole love scene with Rachel (Katie Holmes), anyway? We've already gotten the idea that these two dig each other - let's get on with the show! And wait just a gosh darned minute - do we really need anymore background on an important, pivotal character like Newberry (William Sadler)who gives his life to save the kids toward the end? Nah! And the ending - wouldn't it be so much more profound to have Gavin just kind of show up in some inner-city classroom with chip in his eye than for him to have the powerful final confrontation with Steve on the ferry? Absolutely! MGM screwed up royally with the final cut of this film but, through the miracle of DVD, audiences can now be treated to all of the above-mentioned deleted scenes (and several more that are so riveting you wonder why in the heck...) plus a fascinating audio commentary by David Nutter that gives us a new appreciation for this flawed but intriguing little film. Skip the VHS edition, but do check out the DVD.

This film starts out well enough, with a family moving to the odd little town of Cradle Bay seeking a fresh start, and an escape from the haunting memory of a son and brother who committed suicide. When the family arrives, the town seems eerily too-good-to-be-true. The "kitschy" small town flare, complete with that "everybody knows everybody else" sentimentality, is almost nauseating. How very cliché (can we say "Stephen King?").

When the family's two remaining children (one of them being James Marsden's character, Steve Clark) head out for their first day of school, it becomes easy to discern, to the viewer at least, that something is horribly awry. Sure, the usual high school cliques are present. However, they seem far too exaggerated. For example, the omnipotent "Blue Ribbons" (a.k.a. "jocks") are the school's best athletes, as well as the school's most academically inclined students. Few exceptions aside, is this generally the case? I think not. Furthermore, these students hang out at a yogurt shoppe. It's no longer the 50's, and most high schoolers have other various hang-outs. Yet another clue that should give the new arrivals some insight as to the odd goings-on in Cradle Bay. However, when Nick Stahl's character (Gavin) attempts to inform Steve Clark of the evil plot that is behind the Blue Ribbons and their oddly uniform characters, Steve remains clueless. It takes Gavin becoming a Blue Ribbon himself to spark the light bulb in Steve's head, and he then decides to discover the root of the evil.

With the help of a fellow student, Rachel (Katie Holmes), and a very cheesily written but well acted school janitor (Dan Zudovic), Steve uncovers the extremely "Stepford Wives-esque" plot. The mad scientist behind it all is unveiled just before Rachel and Steve are themselves to become Blue Ribbons. Together they must find a way out of their predicament before it's too late. Thus, the movie comes to it's extremely harried "grand" finale.

This film seems well-conceived, and probably could have been much better than it was in actuality. It would have been interesting to see more of the teenage angst, rebellion, and struggle for individuality yet desire to fit in developed in some of these characters. Perhaps then they would not have seemed so soulless and one-dimensional. The plot, though cheesy and cliched, began with some decent build up. However, the ending was a bit of a let down. Furthermore, some of the plot elements never quite seem to come to fruition, and the deleted scenes included on the DVD extras only partially solve this problem. Many of the scenes were also far too unrealistic. For example, the creepy, dank atmosphere at the asylum and the completely incoherent nature of every patient there seemed far too over-the-top. Not all of those institutionalized mumble, drool, and traipse around like zombies.

Overall, this film is decent for a rental, but not worth the money to purchase.

"It's a new kind of cool." No, it's not the adolescent Stepford Wives, but a serious commentary on society's demands for conformity in high school and beyond. Nich Stahl puts in a brilliant pre-Carnivale performance in a wonderful film that withstands the scrutiny of miltiple viewings. This is definitely worth the purchase price.

Most people in these reviews(and everywhere else) bash this film on a level that should be reserved for the Hulk. They either fail to take into account or choose to ignore the fact that it is a rags to riches film in terms of coming from the shallowest, campiest and most cliched of genres(teen movies) to some of the best social commentary and overall psychological creepiness around. First off, the acting, for the lines, is great. Whatever bs the reviewers feed you, they did great with their lines, and this movie still lists on my top ten good bad movies of all time, if not #1.
The Bad Points:
cut a lot of stuff that added depth to the story, though some of it did hurt pacing a lot.
characters needed to be more fleshed out. This is the most common complaint, though it isnt really fair, since almost all movies except super duper high budget ones suffer from things like this, due to time limitations and such from their tight budget.
Campy as all hell, and i loved it. If you dont like campy movies, fine, but dont go in expecting a teen movie to be shakespeare and i wont cut off your breeding rights for the sake of humanity.
Over the top and cliched. The most valid complaint there is. It's really again a question of two things they didnt have: budget/filming time. If they had the budget of even a third of a LotR movie maybe this would have been movie of the year, instead of a campy teen flick. or maybe not. But anyways, it's like being given a broken erector set and doing the best with what you have.

And now the good:

soundtrack: awesome as hell, if you're into rock music at all. If not, the previews should have cued you in. Also totally appropriate to the scenes it plays in, outlining the already painful teen angst and whatnot. Also, the opening music is the most wondrous and at the same time creepy music i have heard and seen, when combined with the visuals of implanting an optic chip.

Social Commentary: stepford wives clone this is not, so please stfu and die. Yes, many of the same ideas, but in a much different direction, different audience, and im sure even that was far from the first in its genre, just the first people remember. It deals with the twisted ins and outs of high school cliques(and much later society, since practically every social power group tries to lord it over everyone else), and the parents obsession with MAKING their children perfect. And how it backfires on them. This really brings parallels to the sad, pathetic war on video games to divert attention from parental responsibility that is going on now.

Atmosphere: like all great horror flicks, whether awesome campy b movies like this one and say, in the mouth of madness, or grade a ones like event horizon, this movie consistently delivers several types of deliciously awesome atmosphere that just seeps into your pores. First off, there is the atmosphere of the outsider, which is what everyone except the shiny happy people have to live through in high school, dealing with being a social(and often literal) punching bag for the high school elite.
Then there is the creepiness, its like one of those great zombie or alien movies, invasion of the body snatchers maybe, when you never know if someone is going to become one until its too late.
Also is the underlying pain of change and such that teenagedom essentially IS, which is underscored by steve's brother, and by his moving to a new hope(cradle bay) only to find that it festers with more psychological rot than the one he left by a wide margin.

Writing: campy but good. Part Army of Darkness, especially in its funny moments, part dawson's creek, and part manchurian candidate, or something, its a great mix of all the manic moments you encounter in those years, from the disturbingly tragic to the funny as hell, but all with pain as the bedrock.

Characters: Awesome. For how cliched and stereotyped this movie can be if you look at it in a high acting style, they work amazingly well in this movie. The director talks about how they all hung out and bonded off screen onset, and i think it really shows in the chemistry they exude in many of the lines. Katie holmes is by far the best, though almost everyone does great here in their stereotypical roles, but especially the major supporting characters are also awesome, as is the main character.

Overall: this movie impacted me so greatly i became obsessive when i first saw it, though admittedly i was a confused teen at the time. My friend has often said that this and another of my favorites, Dark City, are two sides of the same social commentary, dark city being serious, and disturbing behavior being satire. I would say now, that disturbing behavior is that most disturbing of psychopaths, the satirically serious, much like the demon in fallen who sings rolling stones songs all the time. It is a great movie if you like fun, intense, thought provoking, campy or creepy movies like John Carpenter's older stuff, Dark City, Event Horizon, Manchurian Candidate, Cabin Fever, Phantoms, Army of Darkness, etc...

DISTURBING BEHAVIOR got lost in the shuffle of teen horror movies and failed at the box office, but this one is actually very different from I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER, URBAN LEGEND, and other entries into the genre. BEHAVIOR has more of a sci-fi than a horror edge, which is not surprising because it was made by writers and directors of several "The X-Files" episodes. The teens in the movie have been scientifically reprogrammed to be on their best behavior. Of course, these same teens occasionally snap and go on homicidal rampages...but nobody's perfect, right? However, the behavior I found to be most disturbing was that of the people at MGM, who significantly trimmed down the movie in spite of what was obviously David Nutter's intent. Luckily these scenes have been added on the DVD, which provide a lot of back story and motivation for character's actions that is missing from the final film. Apparently MGM thought that teens were too dumb and restless to sit through actual characterization and cut out quite a bit of this. But the film suffers quite a bit from these missing scenes (except for an alternate ending that was wisely replaced by the one in the film). You can almost hear Nutter weeping over each one in his commentary on those deleted scenes. The doctor played by Bruce Greenwood has a scene at a meeting describing his daughter's success with his program (which it later turns out is a bit exaggerated). This certainly adds depth to a character who is otherwise just An Evil Doctor with no real reason to perform experiments on kids (another scene also reveals these motivations). A tense little scene between Steve and the police is also cut that explained a lot about the town's secrecy, and an explanation of Steve's brother's suicide is also cut. (The story was a bit too Romeo and Juliet for my taste and seemed quite out of place, but at least it explains what everybody is so upset about throughout the film.) And a scene between Steve and his father and another where Steve's mom finds the gun should also have been left in the final cut, which humanizes the parents and gives them reason for enlisting Steve in the program. The film as it is has no explanation for why the characters do what they do: why do Steve's parents sign him up for the program? Why does Caldicott do what he does? Why do the police cover up for him? There are a lot of actions in this movie that don't make sense without some sort of back story. That being said, there are a couple of entertaining sequences, including a trip to Caldicott's former place of employment (it really doesn't serve any purpose to the plot but is worth it to see Caldicott's daughter screaming "Meet the musical people who hide among the flowers!") and the seduction by Lorna, who, upon coming on to Steve and then attacking him with a piece of glass, jumps up and states that she has to go home for a "big physics tests." I wish MGM or David Nutter had at least included a bit of an explanation as to why the kids go psycho or a bit more depth to it (the best scene depicting this is Lorna's "bad, wrong wrong, bad"). A study of how teenagers often struggle with being "good" and their natural desire to be "bad" could have been interesting, but here it is no more than an afterthought. With a little extra work, DISTURBING BEHAVIOR could have been one of the better teen movies, but as it is is only so-so. The DVD gets 3 stars for at least including the deleted scenes and commentary, the movie alone gets 2.

Much has been said about this being a Scream ripoff. Here's my verdict based on my horror-film experience and my observation on the technical execution of Disturbing Behavior:

From screenwriting, directing and cinematographic points of view, Disturbing Behavior has NOTHING to do with ANY of the Scream movies.

Scream and Scream 2 were self-referential commentaries on the horror genre while frankly (and dare I say not very effectively) using the conventions of slasher films for cheap thrills. The value of the Scream movies was in the comedic elements: The wink-wink, nudge-nudge to people who know slasher films well. The impact of Scream, if it has impact on you, is strictly personal, as are the relationships of the characters. (If anything, Urban Legend is an extension of this approach).

Disturbing Behavior is on the opposite end of the spectrum. Sociological in its impact and its intention, broad (and often sketchy) in its character depictions, and completely uninterested in its own genericism, Disturbing Behavior is a conventional suspense-action piece. It doesn't rely on gore effects and slasher-film conventions; for example, one of the most disturbing scenes in Behavior is the scene of near-seducton that ends in masochism -- its impact comes not from physical danger (as in Scream and the slasher-film tradition) but from the concept. Same for the rest of the story -- the question is not whether these kids will get their heads chopped off; it's whether they can retain their own identity. And that is NOTHING that the slasher-film tradition offers because, as shown by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the forefather of all slashers, the slasher film's chief weapon is simple, straight-forward physical danger.

The look of Disturbing Behavior is more noir than slasher, and its storyline is a dead-serious social commentary. Kind of like a much less complicated version of 1984, and limited to young people instead of the whole society.

I actually liked Disturbing Behavior even if its faults are legion -- Marsden's questionable acting, the lack of real depth of the Katie Holmes character (though she tries for more), and a slipshod narrative structure. It's worth a look for writer Scott Rosenberg's bleak view of the institution of education.

Disturbing Behavior is no classic. But to lump it in with Scream (admittedly, the marketing campaign for Disturbing Behavior *did* try to cash in on the horror audience rejuvenated by Scream) is convenient, shallow, and an act of ignorance as to how the two movies respectively work.

DISTURBING BEHAVIOR by itself was a decent, slighly above average film that was marketed as teen horror, when it really is fueled by the same kind of paranoia that director David Nutter worked with on "The X-File's". Seeing it in the theatres, I was surprised by how little it relied on scares, and instead was a more plot-driven quirky sci-fi film. The big problem, however, was the lack of development for many of the character's (particularly William Sadler as the "more-than-who-he-seems" janitor). Therefore, the film was fun and original, but also nonsenical and abrupt. Well, thank god for DVD. DISTURBING BEHAVIOR ranks right with BRAZIL in my opinion as a film the studio did the best they could to commercialize and destroy it (in BRAZIL's case the director won). On DVD, eleven deleted scenes, all with optional commentary by David Nutter can be viewed, and every single one of them adds a great deal to the film. While the great tragedy of the package is that you can't view the film with all this footage added, watching each cut scene seperately reveals a great amount of debt that this film (originally) had. The best of these scenes is definitely an extended meeting between Sadler's janitor and the James Marsden character. In the film itself, this brief meeting shows that the janitor might be more than he seems, but is so brief as to be completely confusing. With the added footage, Sadler brings great poignancy to his character, gives some extremely valuable information on the beginning of the changes in the town, and delivers the (would be) film's best line: "This town sucks for heroes; you looking to be the first?" It's a tragedy that this scene was cut, and you can practically hear David Nutter weep over losing each one of these scenes. The alternate, much darker ending on the boat completely changes the tone of the film and adds a great sadness in its scope, which in my opinion could have gave the film the potential to at least be a solid piece of work, rather than a so-so hackjob. Anyone truly interested in film and its development should consider this film essential (regardless of whether you actually like DISTURING BEHAVIOR or not). An example of how studios can ruin movies, watching this alongside the criterion DVD of BRAZIL shows the difference between what happens when the director wins, and what happens when the studio does. DISTURBING BEHAVIOR could have been, at the least, a good film, but it instead a curiosity. I only wish that one day they re-release this film WITH the added scenes (directors cut anyone?), because I have a feeling that we might have a cult favorite on our hands.

This is one of my favorite movies of all time. It's really well done without the cheesiness of today's horror movies. There's actually some reality to Disturbing Behavior. Love the movie soundtrack too! This movie is in my top 5.

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.

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!