Other movies in this series:
None

Rish's Reviews
After an assault on his teacher, seventeen year old Kale (Shia Lebouf) is placed on house arrest. Stuck at his suburban home alone for the whole summer, a tracking system on his body and plenty of time on his hands (but no porn, oddly enough), Kale grows bored really fast and begins spying on his neighbours. First he discovers an attractive teen girl moving in next door, and while they begin a friendship and more, another neighbour draws his attention. The neighbour (David Morse) is a little odd, but the more Kale watches, the more he begins to suspect him as the one responsible for missing women in the city.
Despite its terrible title, I was somewhat keen to see Disturbia. Oh, not at first, no. I didn't like the trailer. I didn't think its star was likable. I bet against the film on the Hollywood Stock Exchange. But then the movie came out to huge numbers and stayed at number one for three weeks in a row. It was an old fashioned hit, I guess, the kind that spread due to positive word of mouth. So I figured I had to see it in the theatre.
I went to it when Tyranist was out of town and had a good time (though, if I have to be honest in this review, I would've liked it more had the t-man seen it with me). There were some nice scares and good tension and I was surprised by how much I was enjoying the film, and also by how much I liked Shia Lebouf's character. Who knew?
Basically a teenage Rear Window, this shouldn't have been as good as it was. Hitchcock used to talk about the way all audiences are voyeurs and we enjoy looking at other people who don't know they're being watched. I am probably more guilty than anyone of living through other people, watching and projecting myself in places I could never be, doing all that stuff that was uncommon in Hitchcock's day, but which is common enough today to have many different names. Throughout Disturbia, there is that base, visceral delight in seeing the personal and private, from a girl undressing to a man cheating on his wife. I don't know if that bothers some viewers (like, say, my mother, who also saw the movie), but I really responded to it.
The ending seems to be the weakest part of the movie, but just because it presents a few questions that are never answered, and I do wonder where at least one character disappeared to. There was one agonising moment when our hero completely forgets what he's supposed to be doing and becomes distracted for . . . well, about as long as it would take for a fan to be turned on and a Ziplock bag of dog crap to be dumped into it. That moment was rough.
David Morse was quite scary as the neighbour who may be a serial killer, or he may just be a guy we think is a serial killer. Wait, that didn't come out right. Was there ever any doubt that he was a serial killer?
Maybe that's one of the film's flaws. They certainly set up a situation where we might mistrust our narrator, since he only sees things from one point of view and might not only be misinterpreting what he saw, but going a little crazy cooped up in the house. But Kale is level-headed, and decent, and probably more trustworthy than I was at his age. Plus, they set up Kale's mother as being a good, understanding, patient, and loving woman. It just seems to me that you could convince her to at least listen to you, if not the police or strangers. But I'm willing to accept that Kale had burned all his bridges with her over the past year and that while we never saw him being a rebellious scumbag or constant troublemaker or huge liar, that had all happened before.
I've written a couple of horror scripts before, and a major challenge is to come up with plausible--yet not completely overused--reasons for no one to come to our would-be victims' aid. The tried-and-true are: a) they're way out in the middle of nowhere, b) the people they ask for help don't believe them, and/or c) the people that come to help them are killed.
And I've just gone off on a tangent, haven't I?
The director also made Taking Lives. One of the writers wrote Red Eye, as well as "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"'s first Halloween episode. The movie is fun, combining a teen slacker comedy with a murder mystery, it works on both fronts. That still doesn't explain why it was so successful, but the longer I do this the more I realise nobody knows what will be a hit and what won't.
The reviews were mostly positive: "It's a nail-biting Thriller!" "A Hitchcockian Thriller for the 21st Century!" "It's a scary and fun Thriller!" "It's the kind of Thriller that will make you cream in your jeans!"
Am I the only person alive who would rather hear the C-word than the T-word? This is a horror movie, women and men. Dress it up, put a bow on it, change its name on the adoption records and bury the baby you switched it with in an unmarked grave, it's still Horror. You go swimming in an underground pit with rotting dead bodies and then tell me it's not a horror movie.
Best Scare: I don't know if I've mentioned it, but a lot of the film is spying on someone else, whether with eyes, binoculars, or a video camera. The best scare for me was when we're watching a tape of some of the spying and there's a flash of something, when it's rewound and paused, we see something really horrible the camera picked up for a moment. Nice stuff.
I'd Recommend It To: It's not going to be on my All-Time Greats list, but it's well worth checking out.
Posted: May 21, 2007

Total Skulls: 14

Sequel
Sequel setup
Rips off earlier film		Rear Window
Horror film showing on TV/in theater in movie
Future celebrity appears
Former celebrity appears
Bad title
Bad premise
Bad acting
Bad dialogue
Bad execution
MTV Editing
OTS
Girl unnecessarily gets naked
Wanton sex
Death associated with sex
Unfulfilled promise of nudity
Characters forget about threat
Secluded location
Power is cut
Phone lines are cut
Someone investigates a strange noise
Someone runs up stairs instead of going out front door
Camera is the killer
Victims cower in front of a window/door
Victim locks self in with killer
Victim running from killer inexplicably falls
Toilet stall scene
Shower/bath scene
Car stalls or won't start
Cat jumps out
Fake scare
Laughable scare
Stupid discovery of corpse
Dream sequence
Hallucination/Vision
No one believes only witness
Crazy, drunk, old man knows the truth
Warning goes unheeded
Music detracts from scene
Death in first five minutes
x years before/later
Flashback sequence
Dark and stormy night
Killer doesn't stay dead
Killer wears a mask
Killer is in closet
Killer is in car with victim
Villain is more sympathetic than heroes
Unscary villain/monster
Beheading
Blood fountain
Blood spatters - camera, wall, etc.
Poor death effect
Excessive gore
No one dies at all
Virgin survives
Geek/Nerd survives
Little kid lamely survives
Dog/Pet miraculously survives
Unresolved subplots
"It was all a dream" ending
Unbelievably happy ending
Unbelievably crappy ending
What the hell?