Day 67: Disturbing Behavior

This is one is a trip in the wayback machine for me. I saw this in college, I think, which has been a minute. Katie Holmes was well before her Tom Cruise drama and James "Cyclops" Marsden was in this, I guess? I mainly remember it because Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger was a single on the soundtrack and was super catchy.

So what is this movie about? I had to read a refresher but it all came back to me anyway, a group of alterna-teens in Washington start getting turned into perfect, wholesome teens by their parents and a mad scientist by the name of Caldicott. James Marsden and Katie Holmes have to outwit and out fight all their classmates and all the adults in the community (with the exception of Good Will Hunting hidden-genius janitor William Sadler). A lot of teens are killed. In fact, I remember this being a pretty dark movie. It was marketed to people just slightly younger than me at the time and I wonder how it holds up in people's minds who saw it in high school. The whole "wanting to fit in by being different" thing still resonates with me as it was my own strategy for the first two years of high school. The other selling point of this was it's director, X-Files alum David Nutter.