The most horrifying aspect of the latest teen-scream flick, Disturbing Behavior, is that, if you see it, you realize there are at least 42 billion more interesting and exciting ways you could have spent its 84 minute running time — cleaning bathroom tile grout, for example. In fact, there's more suspense in activities like that than in the film: Will I accidentally spray myself in the face with Tile-X?
Although the newspaper ads promise that Disturbing is "The Next Generation of Terror," the truth is, there is little terror in it.
A marriage between Stepford Wives and Scream, the film centers on a kid (James Marsden) whose family moves to the seemingly idyllic town of Cradle Bay after his older brother commits suicide. There, he finds that a psychiatrist (Bruce Greenwood) is implanting a device into high school students that makes them work hard in their classes, hold bake sale fundraisers, and hang out, a la Wally Cleaver, in an ice cream shop, listening to Wayne Newton. The shrink hasn't mastered his procedure, however, and it has a significant side effect: the students develop a tendency toward violence, especially when they're aroused sexually.
The main reason the film fails is that, although there are a good number of scenes in which the evil students surround the heroes in a supposedly menacing fashion, or explode into violence, little bad ever happens. While in the opening scene, one of them breaks the neck of a girl with whom he's making out, during the rest of the film the students are little more than minor thugs. In one scene, a football player, in the throes of arousal at the sight of the female lead (Katie Holmes of "Dawson's Creek"), trashes a supermarket, throwing a couple of other students into canned food and produce displays. Hardly the kind of thing that makes our skin prickle. Later, in what the film tries to make one of the most frightening scenes, Marsden and Holmes visit an asylum housing some of the mutant-victims of Greenwood's early experiments. Although the corridors are appropriately filmed with shadows aplenty, and Holmes voices the horror movie mantra ("I think we're making a big mistake coming here."), nothing of significance happens. They creep through the ward, confront grotesque inmates, and leave — it turns out the mutants weren't really a threat to them at all.
In fact, the most disturbing aspect of the film is unintentional, a dangerous cultural message it perpetuates. In that opening scene, the altered student begins to succumb to passion and then abruptly kills the girl, calling her a slut. Later, one of the treated female students tries to seduce Marsden, giving the movie its obligatory topless scene. Like the boy in the first scene, she stops herself, but instead of immediately trying to kill Marsden, she smashes her face against a mirror, screaming hysterically that what she's doing is wrong. In other words: girls who feel sexual impulses are bad, while boys are merely the victims of seduction.
The film has other flaws, largely in its extraordinary number of loose ends. It never explores the older brother's suicide, for one, using the event as a cheap way to make us feel sorry for the hero. It also introduces a quirky school janitor (William Sadler) who pretends to be retarded but who is really a genius hiding out, and who asks Marsden not to give away his secret — but we never learn his secret and why he's hiding.
At the end of Disturbing Behavior, a crudely tacked-on epilogue suggests the filmmakers are leaving the door open for a sequel.
Now there is a frightening thought.
by Joe Schuster
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