DISTURBIA
(Review)

Shia LaBeouf.
You may not know how to spell his name just yet, but chances are, if you’ve seen Transformers (review: Archive July 2007), you know this kid and you know his face. And though he’s been banging around for a while now (maybe you saw him in Constantine, or in The Greatest Game Ever Played, or in Bobby, or maybe even Disney’s Even Stevens), Steven Spielberg seems to be making a big push to crown him the first official star of Hollywood’s latest generation of actors.
After the Spielberg-produced Transformers, Shia is going to be up on the big screen with pop culture icon Indiana Jones, in the upcoming Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods.
But if there is indeed some evil Spielbergian Master Plan, that Plan starts here, in D.J. Caruso’s Disturbia.

Kale Brecht (LaBeouf) lost his father (Matt Craven) in a tragic car accident a year ago. Since then, he’s had a number of run-ins with the law. The latest ends in his house arrest, for which his mother Julie (Carrie-Anne Moss) needs to pay the state $12 a day for.
Consigned to his house and most of the front- and backyard by a “tether,” tormented by the neighbourhood kids, cut off from his Xbox and his iTunes, and suffering “chronic boredom,” Kale discovers the “reality without the television,” as he starts spying on his neighbours, particularly newcomer Ashley (Sarah Roemer, from The Grudge 2).
But Kale soon begins to suspect his neighbour, Mr. Turner (David Morse), has a murderous secret, and his house arrest quickly proves to be much more than he bargained for.

Now, if anything works in this agreeable popcorn thriller, it’s clearly LaBeouf, who anchors the audience with a credible performance of a teen-ager unsuccessfully dealing with the grief and guilt of a parent’s death.
From the opening prologue, which ends with that great reaction shot as Kale realizes his father is dead, LaBeouf presents an identifiable protagonist who, for all his subsequent fixation on Turner and his suspected crimes, is still at heart, a teen-ager with raging hormones.
LaBeouf proves up to the task, as he juggles all this, while still maintaining the charm and charisma that is speedily making him a household name.
And in Roemer, the film finds a leading lady who meets LaBeouf on the same level. Roemer’s performance may not be as solid as LaBeouf’s (we learn a lot more about Ashley from Kale’s monologue about her than what we actually see on-screen), but she holds up nonetheless.
It’s the other cast members who don’t fare quite as well.

While Carrie-Anne Moss does her best with a slightly underwritten part, Aaron Yoo (who plays Ronnie, Kale’s goofy best friend) is the stereotypical comic relief, and David Morse, is, well, David Morse. The man can do “Creepy Dude” in his sleep, and probably does. It may have been more interesting to have had an actor cast against type as Turner, instead of Mr. King Creepy Dude.

Still, despite sections terribly reminiscent of past films (The Blair Witch Project, Poltergeist, as well as the obvious and oft-mentioned Rear Window—it’s not like this is the first time anyone’s used the Rear Window gambit, after all), Disturbia does succeed in its modest aims.
As I mentioned earlier, it’s an agreeable popcorn thriller. It’s not exactly riveting, but it is engaging. But perhaps most importantly, its success at the box-office is a clear signal that LaBeouf is on the cusp of Hollywood stardom, an idea that Spielberg seems more than happy to see come to fruition.

(Disturbia OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

SHADOWS
ON THE
SHOWER
CURTAIN
(A Psycho
Retrospective)

Dedicated to the memory of Janet Leigh, whose final film role was, appropriately enough, opposite real-life daughter (and fellow Scream Queen) Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween: H20.

Note: This retrospective assumes that the reader has seen either version of Psycho, or is at least familiar with its plot.

“Mother! Oh God! Mother! Blood! Blood!”

From the opening title sequence designed by Saul Bass, orchestrated to the screeching violins of Bernard Herrmann, all the way to the final shot of the car being pulled from the swamp, Psycho is a riveting and unforgettable cinematic experience.
By now, nearly 50 years after its initial release, many are aware of it, even if they’ve never actually seen the 1960 original. Some may have seen the color remake by Gus Van Sant, starring Anne Heche, Vince Vaughn, and Viggo Mortensen in his pre-Aragorn days. There may even be some film students out there who’ve studied the editing of the famous shower stabbing frame by frame, and never bothered to watch the entire film. Their loss.
And, barring all of that, you may have just heard Janet Leigh’s immortal shower scream from a nearby cellphone. Ah, the wonders of modern technology.

“We have twelve vacancies. Twelve cabins, twelve vacancies.”

There are very few individuals who may wish to refute, or even debate, the genius of Alfred Hitchcock as a film director. And in handling the suspense thriller, there are even fewer who can come close to his masterful technique and his uncanny ability to keep the audience at the edge of their proverbial seats.
Consider that in the nearly half-century since its release, Psycho has become known as the granddaddy of the slasher film; the daddy, being John Carpenter’s Halloween. But note that Psycho lacks one of the by-now traditional staples of the slasher film: the chase sequence. Nowhere in the film do we see Norman Bates in a cheap wig and his mother’s clothes stalking either of the Crane sisters down the halls and rooms of the Bates house. Think about it, a suspense thriller without a single chase scene.
Instead, what we have is the spectre of pursuit, the feeling of being on the run, as Marion Crane drives down stretches of the American Interstate with nothing for company except the imagined voices of lovers, co-workers, policemen, and used car salesmen, with Bernard Herrmann’s hauntingly insistent string section for musical accompaniment.
Another of Psycho’s brilliant achievements is that it is successful in making the audience identify with a less-than-sterling individual as the apparent main protagonist of the tale. Yes, Marion Crane is no murderer; she is simply a person placed in the barreling way of temptation, and who succumbs, mistakenly thinking that $40,000 can buy off her unhappiness (and her lover’s debts).
Still, this was no Jimmy Stewart, the good man unwittingly pulled into mystery and intrigue and danger (as in Hitchcock’s brilliant Rear Window, which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2004). This was not even Tippi Hedren in The Birds. This was a woman who stole $40,000. And she was our heroine.
Until the shower scene.

“It’s not as if she were a maniac. A raving thing. She just goes a little mad sometimes. We all go a little mad sometimes.”

And here, again, Hitchcock subverts, because, the instant we recover from the shock of Marion Crane’s sudden demise, we realize we are without anyone to identify with.
Then, bizarrely, we find ourselves identifying with Norman, who, after all, is only cleaning up. Only doing what a loving, dutiful son would to protect his mother, regardless of how psychotic she may be. Our breath even hitches, as Norman’s does, when Marion’s car stops sinking into the swamp for a second or two.
It is only once the film is over that we realize, for a certain window of Psycho’s running time, before we are introduced to Lila Crane, that we actually identified with the killer. That, in the end, Hitchcock actually did get us to identify, even if only briefly, with a murderer.

“My mother, uh, what is the phrase? She isn’t quite herself today.”

And of course, there’s the cross-dressing.
Keep in mind, this was 1960. Reportedly, the on-screen toilet flushing was already a big deal. Here, not only did we have a loony stabbing women in the shower, but we had a loony stabbing women in the shower while he was dressed up as his mother!
Thankfully, the psychosexual basis for Norman’s pathology is neatly mapped out in the film’s denouement; in the history of serial killer films, Norman Bates is one of the few whose pathology we are actually privy to.
Additionally, Anthony Perkins’ performance affords Norman Bates a very lonely and fragile vulnerability. We understand the trap he was born in, we sympathize with his predicament, at least until we realize just how disturbed the poor man really is.

“Well, a… a boy’s best friend is his mother.”

It is in Hitchcock’s skilled manipulation and subversion of audience expectations that Psycho finds one of its main strengths, and its influence can be seen in the early giallo of Dario Argento—who, in turn, according to writer Douglas E. Winter, has influenced “more directors of horror films since Hitchcock himself”—as well as more recent works like Satoshi Kon’s razor-edged anime, Perfect Blue, and Takashi Miike’s wildly disturbing Audition (both films also clearly influenced by Argento).
Psycho is a film that holds up well for its age—which is, I suppose, the true definition of the term “classic”—the sort of suspense thriller you can watch repeatedly, even if you already know exactly how it all turns out. According to Steven H. Scheuer’s Movies on TV and Videocassette, it “… broke all of the existing rules for horror films and filmmakers,” and “… set the standard for a generation of new ones,” claims that I can only agree with without reservation.

Author’s note: giallo – moody and violent suspense thriller from the Italian school of horror

(Psycho Italian OS courtesy of movieposterclassics.com and Psycho DVD cover art courtesy of ropeofsilicon.com.)