Comportamento Suspeito

After the suicide of the teenager Allen Clark (Ethan Embry), his family decides to move from Chicago to the quiet Cradle Bay Island seeking a peaceful life for the siblings Steve (James Marsden) and Lindsay Clark (Katharine Isabelle). When Steve joins the local high-school, the outcast Gavin Strick (Nick Stahl) befriends Steve and introduces his also rejected friend Rachel Wagner (Katie Holmes) 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. Further he tells that he had witnessed the blue ribbon Andy Efkin (Tobias Mehler) killing their schoolmate Mary Jo (Natassia Malthe) that is missing and a police officer, but the local Officer Cox (Steve Railsback) covered the murders. Steve does not believe in Gavin words, but when his friend is submitted to the treatment of Dr. Edgar Caldicott (Bruce Greenwood) and immediately changes his behavior, joining the Blue Ribbons, Steve and Rachel decides to investigate the mystery discovering the dark secret of the perfect behavior.

"Disturbing Behavior" has an intriguing beginning, with a murder and a group of former troublemakers and potheads transformed in perfect students, like in the classic "Invasion of Body Snatchers". However, when the paranoid Gavin changes his behavior, the plot becomes silly and flawed, and the conclusion is awful. I saw this movie for the first time on 25 March 2000 and I keep my original opinion that this movie is reasonable, but could be great with improvements in the second-half of the story. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "Comportamento Suspeito" ("Suspicious Behavior")

Note: On 24 May 2024, I saw this film again.

Steve and his family move from Chicago to Cradle Bay (which based on a road sign is outside Seattle). We later learn his brother Allen died, and that has something to do with the move. At his new high school, he meets Gavin and U. V., who take drugs and listen to depressing heavy metal music. Gavin has the hots for Lorna, but she's a Blue Ribbon, a member of a group of students that help out in the community and help each other study. Gavin wants nothing to do with these people.

It turns out the Blue Ribbons aren't as goody-goody as they first appear. To call them snobs is an understatement. Anyone who isn't a member is treated like dirt, but of course new members are accepted all the time. The organization had its beginning with a deadly car wreck, and Dr. Edgar Caldicott played a large role in getting it started.

This film reminds me of an episode of 'Smallville', except only the villains (who appear to be the good kids) have the super powers. Or maybe they're not actually super powers. This film had its own version of Belle Reve, where all the Smallville freaks seemed to end up eventually. Also, there was the loud alternative rock music in some scenes and the pleasant classical-style background music in others. I really liked the music in Roscoe's Yogurt Shoppe and in the asylum (I'm referring to Barry Manilow).

I actually found the bad kids appealing in this movie--Gavin, Rachel, and Dickie in particular. The real standout character, though, is the demented janitor Mr. Newberry, who comes across as if Gilbert Gottfried had played the Bill Murray role in 'Caddyshack'. Another good though brief performance came from Julie Patzwald as Betty Caldicott.

This was a little on the violent side, but I guess for the type of movie it wasn't too bad. A lot of bad language seemed to have been cleaned up for TV. And I'm not sure whether this is something that was edited out, but in one scene, the position of a girl's head relative to her date suggests something that happened in Bill Clinton's White House.

It wasn't a classic by any means, but it wasn't too bad.

I thought the movie was very entertaining, even with the similarities to several other movies in mind. I thought the acting was very good, and we should expect to see a lot more of the young actors/actresses in this film, especially Katie Holmes. I can't wait to see more work from her.

This is a very sadly underrated film. This is a film that I believe was intended to wake kids up. It's no artistic venture, I know. It's all laid out in a very simple fashion, and was made for the MTV kids to be able to understand it. Still, the point is a great one, and was carried out well. After reading someone's review of this, I have to say I was enraged. The good guys sometimes smoke pot in this. Would it be worse if they were on crack? Yes, it would. The good guys look a little freaky most of the time. Would it make them better people if they wore "nice clothes"? No, it wouldn't. They cuss a lot and talk their weird, poetic jive. Would they be more interesting if they didn't? No, they would be LESS interesting. The good guys like rock music. Does that make them bad, scary kids? Absolutely not, because you can't judge a person solely on their tastes. And as for the brainwashed psycho kids that even a lot of kids nowadays would root for, they break people's necks because they're ashamed to be sexually aroused. Is that less scary than a kid who just wants to get laid and can't because he's viewed as a monster by society? If your answer is "yes", you are obviously very disturbed yourself. This movie is about the underdogs, those people who are good people but have no choice other than to fight when so many would rather oppress them for being who they really are. This hardens and depresses them considerably, and why shouldn't it? The world is not a "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood", and, though that is a nice fantasy, this movie, despite any fantastic contexts it might have, is full of harsh realities. If there's a world full of Blue Ribbons, things wouldn't be exciting to you unless you're totally brainwashed. If you're not, that makes it scary. That's why this movie sends chills up my spine, no matter how simple and MTV-styled it might be. This is one of the best horror films of the 1990s. At least it's not junk like "I Know What You Did Last Summer". This film has something to say, something only severely distorted people would see as completely negative and wrong. NOT FOR BLUE RIBBONS!

Disturbing Behavior is a difficult film for a serious movie critic to defend, primarily because of a long-standing prejudice to both the teen and horror genres. Granted, few teen movies are designed to treat their subjects with any degree of seriousness. And of all the film genres, horror is kept alive with only the slightest bit of effort, accompanied by even slighter expectations. But director David Nutter tackles both these obstacles in a rare attempt to sophisticate Hollywood's offerings to teen audiences and bring dignity to the maligned horror genre. Despite a screenplay written contrary to his vision, Nutter succeeds in creating a dramatic, moody, and entertaining sci-fi/horror yarn far more difficult to dismiss than its contemporary equivalents. That is, until MGM destroyed it.

It's important to note that the version of Disturbing Behavior being analyzed here is the director's cut, which is not the version released in theaters. Nutter's cut isn't available commercially, but if you watch the DVD's considerable amount of deleted footage and the original ending, you can see just how devastating the studio's changes were.

After suffering the loss of his older brother, Steve and his family relocate to Cradle Bay, where some of the kids at school aren't quite themselves these days. With the help of friends Rachel (Katie Holmes) and Gavin (Nick Stahl), Steve discovers that a local doctor, Caldicott (Bruce Greenwood), is conspiring with parents to lobotomize their teens in order to create "good boys and girls", all of whom become members of the school's Blue Ribbon elitist clique. Caldicott's experiments prevent the Blue Ribbons from sexual impulses and mold them into academic achievers that spend a great deal of their time trying to recruit others to "the program". Unfortunately, the experiments don't always work and trouble is at hand, especially when Steve's parents sign him up.

Scott Rosenberg, the screenwriter of the film, later expressed great disappointment with Nutter's handling of the material. Rosenberg, the screenwriter of Con-Air and Beautiful Girls, never intended his script to be treated as dramatically or realistically as Nutter executed it. Instead, it was supposed to be more "hip" and "cool", allegedly without being mired down by characterization or atmosphere. This seems to indicate that the screenwriter, like the studio executives, had low ambitions with the material, planning to do nothing more than churn out another cheap horror film that insults the intelligence of its target audience.

David Nutter, a veteran director of The X-Files, saw the potential in Rosenberg's script and acted on it. He started by casting three of the most talented young actors in Hollywood. James Marsden breaks the stereotype that models can't be good actors by delivering a subtle, restrained performance as Steve. Katie Holmes has a few opportunities to demonstrate her abilities as well. As the socially outcast Rachel, Holmes combines a defensive posture with an underlying desire to connect. Nick Stahl has the meatiest part, playing the cynical Gavin, a critic of all the other cliques at school. Gavin's quiet omnipotence is colored by a dry sense of humor much needed in the film. Other notable performances include William Sadler as Newberry, the school's janitor. Newberry is a little off kilter, squinting, grumbling, and hell-bent on ridding the world of all rats. Another interesting character who almost steals the show is U.V. (Chad E. Donella), Gavin's reticent albino friend who spends most of the film sitting at Gavin's side and uttering only a few syllables.

Nutter's style is very much the signature X-Files style, dark, steamy, creepy, and purposeful. To achieve this, Nutter enlisted an X-Files photographer (John S. Bartley), the X-Files composer (Mark Snow), several X-Files actors (including Steve Railsback, aka Duane Barry), and key production personnel. The result is a movie that feels like an X-Files spin-off, with a subdued ambiance that washes over you and gets under your skin. Nutter commissioned one of the more remarkable opening title sequences in recent film history, one that serves as a cinematic prelude to the lobotomy procedure later in the film - a rapidly-edited montage of happy images and words designed to hypnotize and brainwash Caldicott's victims.

If Disturbing Behavior should be criticized, it certainly loses points in its third act, one that falls dangerously close to cliché, with Steve becoming more the archetypal hero figure in a predictable and unimaginative showdown with Caldicott and the Blue Ribbons. Since the third act of any story is largely plot (character development is usually pretty well wrapped-up by then), I imagine Nutter had little to work with from Rosenberg's original screenplay. That the first two acts were so emotionally engaging is the result of Nutter's persistence and better judgment. It's too bad that MGM freaked out after a test screening in Texas and thought they could improve their numbers by shortening the film and forcing it into the cookie-cutter shape of the average, low-achieving horror flick.

I champion this film because of its thematic content and its ideology. Like many of my favorite films (RoboCop, Dances with Wolves, Rebel Without a Cause), it deals with characters in crises of identity, trying to become or remain whole, and connect with each other. Equally interesting to me are the notions of sexual repression as a sign of perfection, man playing God, parents' willingness to medically alter their children, and human unwillingness to face loss. Nutter's bold vision for this material, his ability to cull it from a screenplay where it was not just dormant, but banished, makes his director's cut a remarkable achievement. Add in the exemplary performances of Marsden, Stahl, and Holmes, and that special X-Files flare, and I've got something I can really sink my teeth into. - Scott Schirmer