Kale Brecht witnesses the untimely death of his father in a horrible car accident and becomes increasingly withdrawn and troubled. When he punches out his Spanish teacher he is placed under house arrest.
In order to escape boredom, Kale turns to spying on his neighbours from his bedroom window. He becomes convinced that his neighbour Mr. Turner is a serial killer, so he enlists his friend Ronnie and his love interest Ashley to help him investigate.
While Disturbia involves a serial killer, it is no slasher flick. In fact, you never really see anyone getting killed. Instead it is a slick Hollywood mystery-thriller. There's just a few problems.
The first one is that it is a blatant rip off of Alfred Hitchcock's thriller Rear Window, which came 53 years earlier and had the exact same plot. The next problem is that there is no actual mystery here because it is pretty plain to see who did it and what he did right from the start.
There was obviously a budget here and the quality of the film shows that. The acting is also good. But the film runs for 105 minutes and frankly becomes plain dull at times. The film-makers clearly tried to spice up this unoriginal, sluggish, and mystery-less mystery film with lots of scenes of Ashley (Sarah Roemer) in skimpy attire.
Sex sells, but it doesn't save a movie with little else to offer. Neither does the somewhat gory ending, which feels somewhat disconnected from the rest of the film as the villain suddenly turns from a cold and calculating serial killer to a totally irrational mad man and we finally get a little bit of action. Too little, too late.
1 pit of bodies out of 5
Rated PG-13 for sequences of terror and violence, and some sensuality
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