Disturbia (DVD)

Disturbia stars Shia LaBeouf as Kale, a leafy, green cabbage-like vegetable. No, wait. Kale is actually a grieving high school student who, acting out, punches one of his teachers in the schnoz and gets sent before a judge where he sentenced to live under house arrest for three months. It is here that he is forced to take stock of not only himself, but his neighbors.

As he snacks on everything from chunky peanut butter to pizza-flavored potato chips, he takes in all the daily activities of those around him. There's the husband cheating with the maid while his wife's out running errands. There's the new move-ins with a skinny, scantily-dressed daughter. There's the grumpy old man. There're the bratty kids watching Skinemax while mom's back is turned. There's the creepy guy whose house is like a Roach Motel for his nightly dates… could there be something sinister going on there?

Kale's ankle bracelet keeps him homebound, but his binoculars keep him informed. Kale's buddy Ronnie (Aaron Yoo) and the pretty new girl next door Ashley (Sarah Roemer), are soon put to work as his scouts to hunt up clues. When the nasty neighbor gets wind of the kids' intentions to expose him as a serial killer, he decides to test their mettle… but is he just a poseur, or is he really and truly dangerous?

In spite of the ingredients for a good thriller — voyeurism, teenage folly, skullduggery, disappearances, and deaths — Disturbia is more Mr. Rogers Neighborhood than A Nightmare On Elm Street. Not that there's anything wrong with that; director D.J. Caruso can't quite turn a PG-13 vanilla script into truffles (or kale, for that matter), but he does a decent job with what he's got. The actors are all quite good, and well-cast — David Morse and Carrie-Anne Moss costar — it's just a shame they have to play their cardboardy characters in such broad strokes.

The audio commentary features the two leads, LaBeouf and Roemer (talking about everything from her period to his agent), and Caruso (taking multiple cell phone calls as the tape rolls on). It's spirited, profane (LaBeouf… this is nothing new from him), candid, sometimes informative, and often meandering.

There's a Making-Of featurette which runs 15 minutes (and which I did not watch), several deleted scenes (rightly so), a rather flat gag reel (LaBeouf frenches a corpse), and an irritating pop-up trivia track (did you know they speak Spanish in Mexico?). There's also a photo gallery, a music video for This World Fair's song Don't Make Me Wait (played during the "kissing scene" in the movie), and previews for other Paramount movies. For more of these clips, you can go online to Disturbia.com

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