DISTURBING BEHAVIOR

The one lasting memory I have of the film Disturbing Behavior is the moment in the trailer when Harvey Danger’s Flagpole Sitta kicks in with the “paranoia paranoia everybody’s coming to get me” as Katie Holmes and James Marsden run down a hallway. That moment in the trailer has more excitement in it than the entirety of the actual film itself, which is a pretty ho hum Stepford Wivesknock off.

Katie Holmes has had a pretty rough film career. All of her contemporaries at the time seemed to get some kind of slasher franchise out of the 90s. Katie never got her own Scream or even a I Know What You Did Last Summer, and you know she would have been great in one. All she got to do was play second fiddle in this mess, and have the absolute unfortunate luck of being in Teaching Mrs. Tingle. Teaching Mrs. Tingle was originally Killing Mrs. Tingle, but changed its name after the Columbine massacre. The switching of the word Killing to Teaching to this day stands as the most change Americans have done to address gun control.

If you search on the internet long enough you will find an article that claims absolutely anything. There’s an article out there that suggests there is “considerable fan support for the release of the director’s cut” of Disturbing Behavior. Which, I’m sure the director’s cut is better than this version, but I can’t imagine there is “considerable fan support”. Apparently test audiences didn’t respond well to the film so they kept making cuts. So, by the time it arrived in cinemas not only did audiences still not like it, but now they could also no longer understand it. The perfect result of producers compromising somebody’s creative vision.

Where would I fit into Disturbing Behavior? In the town of Cradle Bay there are a bunch of too perfect teenagers. Here’s the thing, there’s, wait for it, something a little bit off about them. Every so often one of the freaks of the school disappears for a couple of days and returns as a reformed neutered jock. Is it mind control? Is it aliens? Is it a scientific experiment? Will I, Peter Jones, get caught up in all of it?