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Trailer for "Disturbia"

Hollywood has long been fascinated with voyeurism, from the sublime (Rear Window, Peeping Tom, Blue Velvet) to the ridiculous (Body Double, Bedroom Eyes, I Saw What You Did). The filmmakers behind Disturbia assume their teenage audience is unfamiliar with those films, which frees them to plunder what they wish from all of them.

When Hitchcock directed Rear Window, he showed us all we needed to know about the main character in one shot: Jimmy Stewart asleep in his wheelchair, facing the rear window of his Manhattan apartment, one leg in a cast. In contemporary thrillers, the main character is required to suffer a traumatic incident in the opening minutes that somehow debilitates him physically or emotionally. (Hitchcock employed such a device in Vertigo, but what was fresh in 1958 is purely mechanical five decades later.)

The traumatic incident suffered by Shia LaBeouf (immortalized on TV’s Project Greenlight, if not the film it produced, The Battle of Shaker Heights) is a nifty one, but it then takes half an hour before his rebellious character starts spying on his suburban neighbors. The bulk of Rear Window is compressed into the next half hour, with the final act saved for over-the-top slasher film shenanigans.

Key to the film’s failure is the casting of character actor David Morse as the killer next door, who’s never as menacing as Raymond Burr was in the Hitchcock classic, even though Burr’s character only killed his wife and Morse’s body count matches the rising number of clichés in this patchwork quilt. By the time corpses began floating in a submerged basement, I thought I was watching Ringu or Rob Zombie’s House of 1,000 Corpses.

Last year the indie flick Brick showed that an interesting film could be made by marrying film noir conventions to a high school milieu; judging by the laughter, gasps and applause of the teenage girls in attendance at the screening I saw, this new contrivance will prove once again that there’s a great deal of money to be made by pandering to the audience.