Disturbing Behavior (1998)

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

Disturbing Behavior is basically Stepford teens. It focuses on James Marsden's character, whose family has just moved to this small coastal town. There is something very sketchy about a lot of the high schoolers there... They used to be these average kids who did normal teenage stuff... That is until they were brainwashed. Marsden and his friend, Katie Holmes, quickly find out just what is really going on, and try to stop it. I enjoyed this film a fair amount. It is pretty well done and it knows its main audience, which is teenagers. And yes, it has a pretty strong teen vibe to it, a 90s vibe also, but it's not overboard to the point of annoyance. The acting is good, especially from a very young James Marsden. Also the actors fit their roles well. The writing is average, won't win any awards but its not bad and trust me I've seen a lot worse. I think this film can serve as one of those just viewed for purely fun purposes, nothing too heavy. 7/10.

In the 1990s, when the teen horror genre was on the brink of obscurity with fans growing tired of same horror clichés repeated over and over; Wes Craven shocked audience with his highly original horror flick 'Scream' and later came a new original horror film 'I Know What You Did Last Summer', both of which reignited the teen horror genre to fandom. However, this thriller directed by David Nutter who is responsible for the hit science-fiction television series 'X-Files' attempts to imitate a teenage version of 'The Stepford Wives', but suffers from a dull execution and absurdly ineffective thrills. This movie follows young teenager Steve Clark (played by James Marsden) who moves with his family to a coastal town in Ohio after the suicide of his younger brother Allen. Upon arriving at his new school, he meets a few social misfits including Gavin (played by Nick Stahl), U.V, (played by Chad E. Donella), and Rachel (played by Katie Holmes) who warn him against a sinister group called "The Blue Ribbons", an organization run by Dr. Edgar Calicott (played by Bruce Greenwood), of academically perfect and socially flawless students. Little does he know, this heinous group has a plan to overrun their town with a sinister plot of brainwashing individuals, and his only hope is the help of Rachel and the eccentric school maintenance man Dorian (played by William Sadler)The basis of the plot is that the students of this mysterious organization have power over pretty much ever social figure including the law enforcement. In one scene, a student from the Blue Ribbon group murder a man at a supermarket and the cops watch and do nothing to intervene. As the title suggests, the movie deals with teenagers who are brainwashed into committing violent and disturbing behavior, but the only thing really disturbing about this movie is how dull and incompetent it is. The film falls in a shallow ground of flaccid thrills and a complete lack of substance, pulling the audience into an atmosphere that is supposed to create a sense of eeriness, but fails to formulate even one effective scare. The scenes of the Blue Ribbon students hunting down the characters try make us believe that that teenagers running around in strange, zombie-like manners or erotically threatening the characters is supposed to be scary, but the results are just weak. And without any suspense or even jump scares to support its tone, what viewers are left with is a total scare-free environment. The biggest redeeming quality may come from the fine performances and a few mildly developed characters. Overall, these are buried under the a painfully executed plot, ineffective scares, and Bruce Greenwood playing a villain that feels all too one-dimensional. Disturbing Behavior is a pretty forgettable film, and an utter disappointment, a movie that had so much potential with David Nutter, the mastermind behind X-Files directing it, but wasted it on such a thrill-free fare. If you are looking a decent teen horror film from the 90s, you may better off looking elsewhere, unless you are more than willing to give this one a try.

A teenager named Steve Clark (Jamie Marsden of X-Men fame), moves with his family to a small town called Cradle Bay in Washington State after leaving Chicago due to his older brother committing suicide. He encounters outcast stoners named Gavin Strick (Nick Stahl) and U.V. (Chad Donella). They're at the bottom of the social ladder at Cradle Bay HS. Steve also meets the Blue Ribbons, a type of Phi Beta Kappa-esque group of seemingly civic-minded student athletes. They seem like typical high achievers at first, but they're violent elitists, given to random acts of bullying, intimidation, assault and seen in the opening scene, murder. Before participating in the mysterious Program run by the resident school psychologist, some of the Blue Ribbons' leaders were once good friends of Gavin and U.V. It seems that Gavin, Steve and Rachel Wagner (Katie Holmes), Gavin's only other friend and Steve's love interest, are the only ones that truly take notice of the Blue Ribbons destructive nature while parents and community leaders look the other way. On the plus side, they did have an interesting idea of an almost cult-like group of student high achievers along with some creepy scenes seen with the 'recruiting' they do. The negatives, they give in to stereotyping, with jocks, stoners and social outcasts. The most disturbing thing about this movie may be the idea of some misguided educator deciding that the 'bad students' need to be improved through aggressive Pavlovian conditioning.

Disturbing behavior is a really good movie that takes awhile to get into but once you do you get hooked into wanting to know what is going to happen next in the captivating plot of this movie and even though I may sound like it no I am not a member of the blue band club! This movie has it all mystery, drama, action ,suspense and romance. It also provides an excellent villain in the evil brainwashing Dr Caldicott. I mean how evil do you have to be to brain wash your own daughter and fail and then lock her up in a mental institute. This movie has you waiting to see the demise of the evil Dr caldicott and the blue band club and it finally happens at the end of the movie or does it? You'll have to watch and find out I guarantee you will be surprised by the ending. I give this movie 9/10 and I highly recommend if you have the opportunity to do so to check it out you wont regret it.