Starring: Shia LaBeouf, David Morse, Carrie-Anne Moss, Sarah Roemer, Aaron Yoo, Jose Pablo Cantillo.
ELECTRONICALLY tagged teenager Kale (LaBeouf) must remain under house arrest for the next three months as punishment for assaulting one of his teachers. If he should stray more than 100 feet outside the perimeter of the house, the sensor on his foot will alert the police and officer Gutierrez (Cantillo) will gladly escort him to prison.
Spying on the locals with a pair of binoculars to pass the time, Kale entertains the outlandish notion that the loner across the street, Mr Turner (Morse), might be a serial killer responsible for the deaths of young women in the area.
Kale plants seeds of suspicion in the minds of sexy neighbour Ashley (Roemer) and goofy best friend Ronnie (Yoo), and the three youngsters conspire to prove their theory.
Disturbia is a slickly engineered, paranoia thriller that disorients us with a bravura opening set piece that neither we nor indeed the characters see coming. Director DJ Caruso sustains the tension well through the myriad twists and double bluffs of this 21st century, high-tech reworking of Hitchcock's Rear Window.
LaBeouf is a likeable teenage rebel, well versed in sarcasm, like when Kale's mother (Moss) looks despairingly around the pigsty that has become her home and demands, “Clean up your room and clean up the kitchen”, her son retorts lazily, “Let me just check my schedule.”
The romantic subplot with Roemer's babe next door simmers gently and Yoo plays goofy to the hilt. Morse and Moss compliment the young leads with solid supporting performances, coming to the fore in the film's overwrought final act, which batters logic to a bloody pulp.
DVD extras: Director and actors commentary, The Making Of Disturbia featurette, This World Fair - Don't Make Me Wait music video, serial pursuit trivia pop-up quiz, deleted scenes, out-takes.
Rating: ***
SUPERBAD (Cert 15, 108 mins, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Comedy/Romance, also available to buy DVD £17.99/two-disc DVD £19.99/Blu-ray £24.99)
Starring: Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Bill Hagen, Seth Rogen, Emma Stone, Martha MacIsaac, Aviva Farber.
BEST friends Seth (Hill) and Evan (Cera) are accepted into different colleges and try to ignore their impending separation by getting trashed at a party hosted by Jules (Stone), whom sex-obsessed Seth wants to bed. In order to impress Jules and Evan's mathematics classmate Becca (MacIsaac), the duo makes bold promises about providing alcohol for the party, with a little help from sidekick Fogell (Mintz-Plasse), who has a fake ID card naming him as a 25-year-old from Hawaii called McLovin.
Fogell's nervous attempts to buy booze end in disaster and two cops, Officers Slater (Hagen) and Michaels (Rogen), are called to the store. Thus begins a night of surprises and revelations for the hormone-fuelled young men.
Greg Mottola's foul-mouthed romp confirms the teen sex comedy is very much back in fashion. Written by Rogen and Evan Goldberg, Superbad is a surprisingly sentimental story of two socially inept friends, who live in each other's back pockets, but must now contemplate divergent futures.
t's a fitfully amusing cautionary tale that ricochets at full pelt between gross-out humour (an unseemly stain on one boy's trousers) and touching self-reflection. Hill and Cera are an entertaining double-act, the former a spouting a machine-gun tirade of obscenities, the latter shy and retiring, nervous of what life on college campus might bring.
Mintz-Plasse is destined to become a cult figure as the buffoon with a heart of gold while Rogen and Hagen handcuff the film in the realms of the preposterous. Superbad is a generous slice of filthy-minded fun, mixing salty humour with sweet emotion. Dig in.
DVD extras: Director and cast commentary, unseen footage, deleted and extended scenes, gag reel, Cop Car Confessions; two-disc version: Director and cast commentary, unseen footage, deleted and extended scenes, Cop Car Confessions, The Making Of Superbad featurette.
Rating: ***
