Steroids.

Rating: 6/10 (31 August 2015)

The girl friend in this desecration of Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window" is Sarah Roemer whose character is named "Ashley", as it should be. She's a knockout ex-model, along the lines of Gwyneth Paltrow but without the magnetism or talent. She has deliciously narrow shoulders and seems to hunch them up and hold them back, as if someone had told her it makes her look slinky and sexy, which it does. What a flawless figure. Yum.
And Shia LaBeouf, of unprepossessing appearance, does surprisingly well in the James Stewart role of the housebound peeper. I'd only seen LaBeouf in "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls," or whatever that miscarriage was called, and he was a blank.
Perhaps the most compelling performance is given by Viola Davis in the small role of the police officer who puts one of those home-arrest anklets on LaBeouf. She's a marvelous actress.
The writers have taken "Rear Window", pumped the story full of adrenalin and various psychedelic substances, and turned it into a comedy thriller about teens. In the original, James Stewart suspected one of his neighbors of murdering his irritating wife. Here, David Morse, older and throatier, is a serial killer who hides rotting bodies all over his house. Of course, no one believes LaBeouf or, after she's convinced, Roemer either. They have an Asian sidekick, Aaron Yoo, who adds comedy and suspense to some scenes.
I won't bother describing the whole plot. Parts of the narrative are idiotic, beneath imagining. A madman is stalking you in your house, carrying a lethal baseball bat, so you escape from him -- after a scene reminiscent of Nicholson's "Here's JOHNNY" -- and you run into the murderer's house, searching for your mother, who may or may not be there. The basement of his house turns into a terrifying milieu out of H. P. Lovecraft, with dark sub-basements and pools of decomposing corpses, so the hero can fall into them and scream.
I'd better be careful because I don't want to give away the ending, in which LaBeouf kills the lunatic and saves himself, his mother, his girl friend, and the Oriental gentleman.
It's a surprising climax though. Pardon me, but isn't the dead killer supposed to explosively spring back to life? I can't imagine how the writers and directors skipped that cliché. They make up for it by using so many others -- the hand reached in from off screen and touching the hero's shoulder, accompanied by a loud electronic WHAM on the sound track. (Twice.) And the spastic movements of the camera during action scenes, making it almost impossible to grasp what's happening.
I enjoyed it for what it was -- cinematic treif.