Confession: This wasn’t one of my favourite movies from my youth, however, it WAS a movie I saw once during my youth that I thought at the time was cool and did want to revisit it, so I did. Well, apparently my memory of this movie was completely rose-tinted as I disliked this movie very much on my second go around.
This was Katie Holmes first role playing the “bad girl” and Nick Stahl was an up and coming rising star (that sadly merely crashed into the pit of anonymity now). The basic plot of Disturbing Behavior is that two siblings relocate to a small idyllic small town with their parents after their older brother committed suicide. The first thing they notice is that all the students there are seemingly perfect, and soon even the so-called revels start to turn. Only backfire? The perfect students seem to become irrationally violent when triggered by sensations of sexual desire.
I feel like the movie was trying to make some social commentary about how teenagers should be allowed to be themselves rather than be pressured by their parents and school administrators to be perfect as it could cause them to become violent (not sure if the director was trying to allude to the pressure of being a teenager as a reason why there were school shootings or teenage suicide).
However, the movie falls short cause of terrible editing, bad acting, and just overall bad script. Although it seems that the director wasn’t satisfied with the end result either, claiming that the movie got so transformed in post-production that it didn’t even feel like it was the same movie he had shot on set. So who knows, maybe this movie could’ve been better than it was. But for how it stands as a completed project, it’s definitely not that good at all, and not even one that has aged gracefully over time either. In other words, you’re better off checking out The Faculty instead. At least that one didn’t try to take itself so seriously.
The Inkblotters 