You know a film’s in trouble when it’s more fun writing about it than watching it.
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You know a film´s in trouble when it´s more fun writing about it than watching it. The only thing disturbing about "Disturbing Behavior" is seeing how thoroughly the filmmakers undermined a promising story idea. This would-be horror flick starts off with a nifty premise: A sinister force is turning extremely bad high school students--losers, failures, troublemakers, potential dropouts--into ultraconservative, straight-A, do-gooders. But they have one small flaw--when they get sexually aroused, which is about half the time, they go berserk and start killing people. Well, nobody´s perfect. From that point on the movie goes downhill. Really fast.
Cradle Bay is an idyllic seaside community; just the place for a family to move if it wanted to escape the stress of big-city life and a recent family tragedy. But the town wasn´t always that way. Two years before, the teenagers were partying, speeding, and wreaking havoc. Now, all is quiet and peaceful. How odd.
Steve Clark (James Marsden) enrolls in Cradle Bay High hoping to forget his brother´s death. On his first day he meets Rachel Wagner (Katie Holmes), Gavin Strick (Nick Stahl), and U.V. (Chad Donella); plus a whole lot of weirdoes, especially among the school´s best students, the Blue Ribbons, all of whom look like they just stepped out of "Leave It To Beaver." They are, of course, electronically brainwashed zombies, and one by one each of the students at school is being sucked into the group. Gavin is the only one to figure out what´s happening, but not before it´s too late for him, too. This leaves our hero, Steve, and his new friends to fight the growing menace, along with the help of a goofy school janitor and his "eraticator." And that´s about it. They catch on, there are a couple of creepy, atmospheric scenes in the beginning, they fight a mad scientist, some people die, and it´s over. Didn´t anyone involved with this picture ever watch "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"?
The film was directed by David Nutter, whose previous credits include two "Trancers" films and several TV episodes of the "X-Files." On the "X-Files" almost nothing is ever explained; it keeps the audience coming back week after week. But in a movie it helps to establish believability by offering at least a few plausible reasons for things happening. In "Disturbing Behavior" the filmmakers have such contempt for their target teenage audience they don´t bother with explanations. A look at the deleted scenes included on the disc show they´re mostly exposition; left in they would doubtless have made a better, more coherent, more intelligent story. But the filmmakers cut everything that got in their way, apparently trying to end the whole affair before their young viewers lost interest. I´ve got news for them: Having taught high school for thirty years, I can vouch for teenagers having just as good attention spans as anyone else. Didn´t the filmmakers believe that teenagers could think? Dumbing down the movie was the last thing they should have done.
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[release]355[/release]