Disturbing Behavior

“The problem with America is mankind’s abject unwillingness to contribute to the delinquency of the young.”

That’s what Nick Stahl shouts at a middle-aged man who refuses to buy him a case of beer in Disturbing Behavior, yet another variation on Red Scare paranoia horror from 1998 – the other notable being The Faculty, which is probably the superior film despite its lack of James Marsden’s hair. Behavior is mostly remembered for two things: the first being the supremely catchy “Awooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo (Got You Where I Want You)” by The Flys* and the latter being the part from the trailer where the chubby jock (somehow appropriately named Chuck) asks Katie Holmes to go out with him and his bellowing, violent “WHY NOT?!!!!” in response to her refusal, which is a reservoir of out of context humor.***

One of the things that sets the late ’90s teen scream boom apart from the one of the late ’70s and early ’80s and the one that they’re desperately trying (and failing) to manufacture today is the way that the kids – the central characters – are portrayed. In the classics, they are capricious, promiscuous, abusive villains.  In the modern horror story, they are victims. But in that window post-Scream and pre-Columbine, the protagonists in dead teenager movies are more than likely empowered actors – they’re (mostly) not the cause of what’s happening**** and the film doesn’t fetishize their powerlessness like the filmmakers do in the late-model remakes of Prom Night, Friday the 13th, and Nightmare on Elm Street.

Let’s be honest: these movies are not Oscar winners. They aren’t that great. They’re derivative of at least three other movies.  Disturbing Behavior has a subplot about a janitor who pretends to be mentally ill but is actually a genius, the brainwashed teens are disabled by loud noises and Katie Holmes’s character occasionally refers to herself in the third person.  But Stahl and Marsden manage to make the movie watchable, manage to make it fun. Structurally, I wish they’d given Stahl more to do in the third act other than loom ominously over Marsden and say “Ice, Ice Baby.” Having Marsden square off against Bruce Greenwood doesn’t really have as much impact, just because Greenwood isn’t as active a character in the film. Behavior is imperfect, but it doesn’t fail to keep me entertained. Maybe it’s nostalgia. I don’t know.

What about you?

For what it’s worth, I’ve cobbled together an (incomplete) list of Scream derivatives and contemporaries, all released in the 1996-1999 window.

Scream

Scream 2

I Know What You Did Last Summer

I Still Know What You Did Last Summer

Urban Legend

Carrie 2: The Rage

Disturbing Behavior

H20: Halloween 20 Years Later

The Faculty

Disturbing Behavior

Idle Hands

House on Haunted Hill*****

The Blair Witch Project

The Craft

*This may not be the actual title.**

**You may remember that the song, much like Harvey Danger’s “Flagpole Sitta” (which also appeared on Disturbing Behavior‘s soundtrack), was classified by MTV as BZ – Buzzworthy.

*** In context, it’s followed by an attempted rape, so not so much with the laughs.

**** And even when they are the cause, as in Urban Legend or I Know What You Did Last Summer, there’s still enough of a lack of malicious intent surrounding the inciting incidents that you root for the heroine, because she’s only separated from you by bad luck or one bad choice. Compare that with the teens from the original Prom Night or the pack of slaughtered counselors from the Friday the 13th saga.

***** The Dark Castle relaunch doesn’t actually feature any teenagers, but it does keep with the loose ‘formula’ of the dead teenager film.

Tagged as: Horror, I Am A Giant Nerd, Movies