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Greenwood, slumming here after his last appearance in the exquisite "Sweet Hereafter," goes the whole foam-flecked, mucus-spewing route ("Today high school, tomorrow the world!") as Dr. Caldicott, a screwball who plants some kind of chip (computer, not potato) in the eyes of bad kids, and turns them into models of dreary rectitude, except when they get turned on, when they like to break a few heads.
That's the gist of the film: It's a horror film for the '90s that could have been called "I Was a Teenage A Student." But the director, David Nutter, doesn't leave room for humor. (A middle-aged reviewer and father of two teenagers can't say: So the kids are robotized? What's the problem?) Instead, they turn brutal so fast there's no room for fun at all.
In fact, aside from some morbid wit here and there, the movie too quickly becomes a head-thumping contest; everybody gets hit upside the skull, and the soundtrack always records a soggy crunch that's deeply annoying.
You can guess the plot. The new boy (James Marsden) comes to the Seattle island suburb of Cradle Rock, makes friends with the nerds, but is wooed by the cool kids. Ultimately he sides with the nerds, but meanwhile the cool kids are getting more violent. New kid and his girlfriend penetrate the conspiracy and finally uncover the mad doctor's influence on all this. Much violence precedes this development, and much violence follows it.
It's as a marketing strategy that "Disturbing Behavior" exhibits its true genius. The movie is actually secondary to the campaign, which will woo teens in the millions with its insistence that the good kids you know, those hated gods at the cool table in the lunch hall, with their varsity letters and their cheerleading outfits, their honor society pins, their pimpleless skin and brace-free teeth, their Ivy League early admission acceptances already secured those damned good kids, they're really robots, and the world can only be saved by marginalized losers like the rest of us.
Hmmmm, come to think of it, I still hate those kids, and I still believe that only the rest of us can save the world.
"Disturbing Behavior" is rated R for sexual innuendo, profanity and much violence.
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