Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #139 Disturbing Behavior (1998)

Getting Grungey With It!

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. 

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and disgraced former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.

For Shoctober I’m trying to cover as many scary movies for this column as possible. I try to be a good citizen of Halloween, particularly on this here site. So when the kind soul who commissioned the Kitaen and Gayheart pieces requested the forgotten 1998 chiller Disturbing Behavior I jumped at the opportunity because it hit me right in the nostalgia sweet spot. And, as always, I desperately need the money.

I have enormous fondness for the wave of smartass, self-referential horror movies that followed in the wave of Scream’s paradigm-shifting success despite the vast majority being egregiously awful. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that I have mad love for Scream knock-offs because they are so overwhelmingly bad in ways that push all my buttons.

Even by the low, low standards of post-Scream teen horror movies, Disturbing Behavior is an audience-insulting abomination, a desperate attempt to cross-breed Heathers with The Stepford Wives that ends up desecrating rather than honoring its inspirations. 

The poor decisions begin with casting James Marsden, who has the curious distinction of having looked like a hunky, hearty thirty-five year old for the last twenty-two years, as high school student Steve Clark.

look at these kids!

Steve is supposed to be having trouble fitting in at his new school in the small town of Cradle Bay, Washington because he’s the new kid and he’s still reeling from the suicide of his older brother Allen (Ethan Embry). But his real problems seem to stem from clearly being a decade older than his classmates. 

Our painfully bland hero looks like a Pro Bowl quarterback. Steve is clearly the most handsome, athletic, clean-cut and sober straight arrow ever to matriculate at the high school. so of course Gavin Strick (Nick Stahl), the school’s champion loser immediately pegs him as a likely recruit for his dwindling posse of apathetic stoner burnouts. 

But first Nick hips the suspiciously mature-looking new kid to the cliched realities of high school life by explicating the key differences between the various cliques. 

This scene has been done countless time in teen movies, perhaps most famously in Mean Girls, but it has perhaps never been done more clumsily than it is here.

Here are some particularly choice excerpts from Gavin’s Tone-Deaf MTV poetry slam jam introduction to the school’s various factions:

“Check it out 

There you got the motor heads 

Car jocks, all the world’s a gasket

A lube job and a pack of Luckies

Music of choice: Positraction Overdrive

Classic rock 

Skynyrd, The Allmans, Bruce

Drug of choice: beer, Miller Genuine Draft

Keggers can’t be choosers!

There you have your micro geeks 

Nerds, whiz kids and various other bottom feeders

Music of choice: the sound of an Apple PC being booted up

Drug of choice: Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Our time

And a cup of Jasmine tea on a Saturday night 

You have your skaters 

Rippin, ragin’ kids and their ramp tramps 

Baggy pants, Dickie Wools

Doin’ 50/50 grinds with an ollie grab finish

At a homemade half pipe in the woods 

Music of choice: the whack of a hacky sack

Drug of choice: ecstasy

E tab, baby! Longer lovin’ through science.”

But the only clique that matters are the Blue Ribbons, who Gavin sizes up as 

“A community group 

Good kids 

Have bake sales, car washes, 

Kiss a lot of adult sphincter

Blue robots, here here…

The group’s music of choice, 

The hum of perfection, the buzz of ambition

Drug of choice: the pursuit of clean living 

at the expense of all who sniffle at the hem of their gowns”

Name a more iconic trio!

Stahl is desperately trying to channel the outlaw cool of Christian Slater in Heathers, the ironic hyper-formality, the tongue-in-cheek verbosity that suggests that everything, but everything, is a glib joke, particularly matters of life and death. 

Instead Stahl comes off like a stoner working at a renaissance fare who uses as many ten dollar words as possible to say absolutely nothing. He’s not channeling Slater: he’s cosplaying as him badly. 

Scott Rosenberg uses all of the slang he knows, whether it makes sense or not, then makes up his own. In Disturbing Behavior, the Kangaroo Jack screenwriter desperately tries to make “razor” happen as a synonym for “cool” and like “fetch” it is a lost cause. 

The Blue Ribbons are the brainchild of school psychologist and mad scientist Dr. Edgar Caldicott (the great Bruce Greenwood, in a career-worst performance). 

Hey, teacher, leave that kid alone!

Dr. Caldicott offers the parents of Cradle Bay a singularly terrible Faustian bargain: he transforms their troubled kids into clean-cut, preppy over-achievers with good grades and impressive extracurricular activities through a brain transplant and A Clockwork Orange-style re-programming. The only downside is that these frat boy and sorority girl types are glowering teenaged Terminators who turn into murderous, violent monsters whenever they’re sexually aroused. 

These are sexy teenagers so they are sexually aroused roughly four hundred percent of the time, which leads to all manner of accidents, killings and brutal beatings. That isn’t just one hell of a design flaw: it’s a deal-breaker. 

Then again Dr. Caldicott wouldn’t be a mad scientist obsessed with playing god if he was reasonable. 

Katie Holmes, the very personification of “basic”, is hilariously miscast as Rachel, the school’s resident bad girl with a heart of gold and an unfortunate propensity for saying things like “Who put the acid in my spam?”, “sounds razor” and “Fail to be a tumor, Gavin.” Rachel is a vision in midriff-bearing black, with a nose-ring that silently but unmistakably screams “rebel.” 

The great William Sadler also does perhaps the worst work of his career as Dorian Newberry, the school janitor, a twitchy, rat-obsessed outsider seemingly suffering not just from a neurological disease, but rather from all of them. It’s an impossibly hammy, over-the-to performance, a grotesque burlesque of mental illness that seems an offensive put-on because it is a bad taste put on. 

Steve figures out that the creepy janitor is only pretending to be suffering from mental illness as a way of defeating Dr. Caldicott when he sees that he’s reading a copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. Obviously anyone familiar with an obscure figure like Vonnegut has to be a brilliant iconoclast, particularly if they’re familiar with Slaughterhouse Five. Vonnegut certainly would never appeal to anyone who was a little off. The same is obviously true of another obscure but pretty cool novel not many people know about, J.D Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. 

When Travis becomes a dead-eyed, glowering, achievement and conformity-obsessed Blue Ribbon Steve comes to realize that something is terribly wrong, leading him and Rachel to investigate Dr. Caldicott’s failed brainwashing-intensive past to figure out why everyone is changing so dramatically and for the worst. 

Scott Rosenberg’s screenplay continually calls attention to itself and its egregious awfulness. Disturbing Behavior is a satirical horror comedy that forgets the satire and the comedy and for good measure neglects to be scary as well. 

At eighty-three minutes, it’s at least blissfully short but that’s really all it has going for it beyond the cheap but potent buzz of Gen X nostalgia.

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