Taglines: In Cradle Bay… there’s nothing more frightening than perfection.
Disturbing Behavior movie storyline. After the suicide of the teenager Allen Clark, his family decides to move from Chicago to the quiet Cradle Bay Island seeking a peaceful life for the siblings Steve and Lindsay Clark. When Steve joins the local high-school, the outcast Gavin Strick befriends Steve and introduces his also rejected friend Rachel Wagner to the newcomer.
Gavin exposes to Steve in the refectory the punks, the nerds and the different tribes of the school and he defends the weird theory that a sinister force changes the behavior of the annoyingly perfect “Blue Ribbons”, a group of good students that wear identical jackets and gather in the Yogurt Shoppe.
Disturbing Behavior is a 1998 American science fiction horror film starring James Marsden, Katie Holmes, and Nick Stahl. The screenplay, written by Scott Rosenberg, follows a group of high school outcasts who are horrified by their “Blue Ribbon” classmates, and was compared unfavorably by most critics to the 1975 thriller, The Stepford Wives. The film was directed by David Nutter, who was a director and producer of The X-Files as well as a director and co-executive producer of Millennium.
Film Review for Disturbing Behavior
There’s something awfully creepy about the Blue Ribbons, a clique of letter-sweater-wearing, bake-sale- sponsoring teen-agers whose numbers are rapidly increasing at Cradle Bay High School, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest.
Under the tutelage of a messianic guidance counselor named Dr. Caldicott (Bruce Greenwood), these robotically well-mannered goody-goods who soak up vintage Barry Manilow and Olivia Newton-John records in Cradle Bay’s Yogurt Shoppe are on a sinister mission to drain all the juice from American teen-age life.
Unfortunately for everyone, these adolescent cousins of ”The Stepford Wives” aren’t the perfectly finished products of modern neurosurgery that their leader would like them to be. It’s their hormones, you see. When sexually stimulated, no amount of programming can prevent these perky model citizens from going momentarily berserk with lust and rage, after which they lapse back into a glassy-eyed docility.
”Disturbing Behavior,” in which Steve (James Marsden), the cute new boy in town, finds himself at first wooed and then coerced into Blue Ribbon membership, could have worked as an eerie fable about teen-age identity and social stratification in the age of Prozac had its creators (the director David Nutter and the screenwriter Scott Rosenberg) taken the premise seriously. But this mess of a movie, which crudely stirs together elements of ”The Stepford Wives,” ”A Clockwork Orange” and ”Village of the Damned,” gives the game away in its opening scene in which a sexually aroused Blue Ribbon boy beats his date to death in a parked car.
Every time a laser beam begins shooting out of a character’s eye, ”Disturbing Behavior” sinks a notch further away from hip satire into cheap horror. The movie takes a turn toward the trashy when Steve and his girlfriend Rachel (Katie Holmes) sneak into a local mental hospital that is a 19th-century snake pit of iron doors and screeching lunatics. Eventually, it’s discovered that a noise machine invented to flush out rats from their hiding places has the power to drive the Blue Ribbons mad. From this point on, ”Disturbing Behavior” is a paint-by-numbers creep show that can’t muster enough energy to be the tiniest bit scary.
Disturbing Behavior (1998)
Directed by: David Nutter
Starring: James Marsden, Katie Holmes, Nick Stahl, Bruce Greenwood, William Sadler, Katharine Isabelle, Ethan Embry, Susan Hogan, Tobias Mehler, Robert Moloney
Screenplay by: Scott Rosenberg
Production Design by: Nelson Coates
Cinematography by: John S. Bartley
Film Editing by: Randy Jon Morgan
Costume Design by: Trish Keating
Set Decoration by: Louise Roper
Art Direction by: Eric Fraser
Music by: Mark Snow
MPAA Rating: R for strong violence, sexuality, language, and drug content.
Distributed by: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Release Date: July 24, 1998
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