'DISTURBIA' A TEEN THRILLER WITHOUT A HITCH.

Byline: Bob Strauss

Film Critic

If John Hughes had tried to make an Alfred Hitchcock movie, it probably wouldn't have turned out as well as "Disturbia."

Not that this oddball yet, somehow, seemingly so inevitable fusion of "The Breakfast Club" and "Rear Window" is any great shakes. But it is a well-acted little teenage thriller that takes good advantage of visual premises and common modern technology's increasing potential for making us all avid, and even rabid, voyeurs.

Hughes never wrote anything this juicy. Of course, Hitchcock never made a movie quite this obvious, either, and even though "Disturbia's" climax isn't all that different from "Rear Window's," it smacks of many lesser suspense film endings we've seen in recent decades.

But star Shia LaBeouf, while no Jimmy Stewart, certainly works up a good, convincing head of pervy paranoia as a delinquent peeper who convinces himself that one of his neighbors is a murderer. Writers Christopher Landon ("Another Day in Paradise") and Carl Ellsworth ("Red Eye") give LaBeouf's Kale more backstory than needed. We see how a horrific accident killed his father when he was behind the wheel, which makes his later antisocial behavior more forgivable than a braver movie might need it to be.

Still, Kale doesn't beg for sympathy. He's angry and self-absorbed and in many ways unpleasant, if fundamentally OK.

After slugging a teacher who asked for it, Kale is sentenced to house arrest for the summer. A tracking device is attached to his ankle, and if he goes more than 100 feet from his front porch, the cops will come and haul him off to jail.

After fed-up mom (an underused Carrie-Anne Moss) pulls the plug on his iTunes, xBox and premium cable, stir-

crazy Kale takes to looking out their nice suburban Craftsman's windows. On one side, a new family with a sunbathing hottie named Ashley (Sarah Roemer) has moved in, so that's good. Out the back, though, a big, creepy guy, Mr. Turner (David Morse), has taken up residence. He entertains young women who grow more frightened the longer you watch. And there are these missing-girl cases Kale hears about through the limited media he has left, which Turner could fit a profile for -- if you obsess about it enough.

Kale draws Ashley and his goofy best friend Ronnie (Aaron Yoo, the only one acting like he thinks he is in a Hughes movie) into his investigation, vicariously experiencing their footwork via cell phones and minicams. Such everyday items are cleverly exploited for all the suspense generation that they're worth. Director D.J. Caruso works the mediated footage smoothly into the proceedings, too, and of course the tracking anklet plays as crucial a role as flashbulbs did in "Rear Window."

For all of its up-to-date electronic ingenuity, though, "Disturbia" rarely goes anywhere that you wouldn't expect it to.

Maybe that makes it more like a John Hughes movie than it initially appears. Glitches and all though, it's better than your average teen romp -- or mystery thriller, for that matter.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

DISTURBIA - Three stars

(PG-13: violence, language, sexual situations)

Starring: Shia LaBeouf, David Morse, Sarah Roemer, Aaron Yoo, Carrie-

Anne Moss.

Director: D.J. Caruso.

Running time: 1 hr. 44 min.

Playing: In wide release.

In a nutshell: Teenage "Rear Window" is no "Rear Window," but it does a good job of bringing the housebound voyeur concept into the camera-phone era.

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The events of "Disturbia" provide the opportunity for house-arrested Shia LaBeouf to get close to Sarah Roemer.