Disturbing Behavior (1998)

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!

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.

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.