Disturbia (2007)

Director: D.J. Caruso

Writer: Christopher B. Landon, Carl Ellsworth

Tagline: Every killer lives next door to someone.

Actors: Shia LaBeouf, Sarah Roemer, Carrie-Anne Moss, David Morse, Aaron Yoo, Jose Pablo Cantillo, Matt Craven, Viola Davis

Runtime: 1h 45m

Category: Killer, Psychological

Synopsis: After a fight with his teacher in school, Kale is sentenced to three months of house arrest. Strapped with an ankle tracker and without his internet, cable, or X-Box, boredom sets in. Without anything else to do, Kale starts to spy on his neighbors in an attempt to alleviate his boredom. Soon after, Kale meets his sexy new neighbor, Ashley, and begins to take a special interest in his weird neighbor Robert Turner. After a couple if young girls disappear, Kale notices how their vanishing is similar to how girls were vanishing in Texas three years earlier. He also realizes that Mr. Turner moved to the neighborhood around the same time, from Texas.
After seeing what seems like an assault on a young girl one night in Turner’s house, Kale and his friends decide to find out exactly what’s going on with this strange, quiet neighbor. What starts out as fighting boredom ends up as a fight to protect his family and himself from a possible mass murderer.

Review: I took some time after viewing Disturbia (2007) to think about this review. I was kinda torn with this movie. I liked the way the movie played out and how it was set up. There were things about this movie that I didn’t like, but I’ll get to those in a second. It was interesting to see how much trouble one young man can get into while on house arrest, but it seems that trouble follows Kale wherever he goes.

The main body of the storyline was interesting and well written, and I like Shia as an actor, so I have to say the acting was enjoyable. The character of Robert Turner was well played and a great nemesis. This quiet, unassuming neighbor being this vicious, relentless murderer, has built a catacomb of sorts under his house to hide the bodies of the numerous young women he’s killed over the last three years, and Kale can’t do much but watch because he can’t leave the house.

The whole film gives you this kind of “voyeur vibe”; at first you kinda watch the kids around the block sneak porn, and you wonder why parents would not only put a big screen television in their kid’s room, but also give them access to satellite television. Then you see the husband and wife with the hot housekeeper and you have to wonder how the wife doesn’t suspect anything. Then the movie just gets dark and suspenseful as more of Turner’s darkness flows to the surface.

Soon after the danger starts, Mr. Turner pumps up the heat as he gets Kale’s friends and family involved. Not only does “Mr. Turner” try to get close to Kale’s mom, he also turns things around on Kale during a stakeout as he confronts Ashley in a parking garage. All of this gave me an uneasy feeling that lasted the rest of the film.

Now, the weak points aren’t many but they are worth mentioning. When you make a creepy film like this one, you have to be careful that the love story doesn’t overtake the fear factor, and that’s something that happened here. It seems as though the writers forgot for a second that this was supposed to be a scary movie. The other problem I had was with the fact that while Kale’s father’s death started the movie, the script didn’t deal with the effects his father’s death had on him. That kind of open-handed fuck-up does a lot to kill a storyline, because no one forgets things like that.

Rating: I have to go with a 16 for this one. Although I liked the movie, the weak points were enough to keep me from rating it higher. With a movie like this, I expect to be scared out of my shorts…not lulled by a pretty girl. As I said, the story was written pretty well, but the forgotten story about his father’s death and the impact it had on Kale did a lot of damage to the storyline. Other than those two flaws, I would recommend Disturbia (2007) to anyone looking for a good movie. (16of25).