Swift @ The Movies: ‘Neighbors’ is a mixed bag

Published 12:00 pm Friday, January 26, 2024

When it’s 12 degrees outside, I don’t really feel like going ANYWHERE, especially a movie theater. So for this week’s column, I figured I’d game the system a little bit and just review something streaming online.

Not a difficult task there, since there’s about, I don’t know, 45 million different streaming apps out there. You can even stream the Weather Channel, even though just looking at the window is faster.

Playing iPhone roulette, I ended up on the AMC app. Remember when that stood for American Movie Classics? Well, as evident by our flick of the week, at least they’re still sticking with the “movie” part of their old namesake.

I’m not really sure who the target audience of a movie like “Destroy All Neighbors” is supposed to be. It’s too silly to be a “real” horror movie but it’s still too gross and gruesome to appeal to rank and file comedy moviegoers. Take one part “Beetlejuice,” one part “This Is Spinal Tap” and one part “Silence of the Lambs” and you pretty much have the gist of this one.

The movie revolves around this nerdy fella who’s really into progressive heavy metal, which for those of you not in the know, is indeed a real musical sub-genre. Of course, they never play it on the radio because most of the songs are 19 minutes long and about “Lord of the Rings,” and it’s real hard to wrap McDonald’s commercials around that kinda’ material.

So he’s working on his magnum opus, but one day a new neighbor — this boorish Eastern European stereotype with a penchant for blasting electro-techno-dancehall music at 4 in the morning — moves into the apartment next door and makes his life miserable.

Well, without giving away too much of the story, let’s just say the new neighbor ends up suffering a severe injury — to put it VERY mildly.

And so do a LOT of our main character’s neighbors — hence, the title of the movie.

You know how sometimes movie companies like to promote their films as “psychological thrillers”? Well, I guess you could call this one a “psychological comedy,” since you never really can tell if what’s happening onscreen is “really” happening or just our main character hallucinating.

Which means whenever a character in this movie allegedly “dies,” it’s only a matter of time until they pop back up — looking much worse for wear, but just as chatty as before. That old movie “An American Werewolf in London” had more or less the same shtick. Of course, THIS particular movie is a lot coarser and cruder, even if the special effects aren’t that much of an improvement over the standard stuff we were catching at multiplexes in the early, early 1980s.

“Destroy All Neighbors” is a weird movie, in the sense that its best parts are rather mundane. In a movie littered with electrocutions and bludgeonings and squished heads, the two most memorable scenes involve a quick dialogue exchange at a smelting plant and a hostage negotiation joke where our protagonist’s girlfriend chides him for not telling her that he didn’t have a credit card. I kept thinking to myself that maybe, this movie would’ve worked MUCH better as a straight comedy, without all of the zombies and ghouls and exposed viscera.

Alas, what we end up with is basically “The Three Stooges” meets “Dawn of the Dead,” with a LOT of abstruse rock and roll references thrown into the mix. Surely, that kind of combination appeals to some folks out there — but I can’t imagine it being enough people to fill in any movie theater in town.

It has its moments, but at the end of the day, probably the best thing I can say about “Destroy All Neighbors” is that it’s just slightly better than average — worthy of a TWO AND A HALF PIECES OF POPCORN OUT OF FOUR rating in my book.

Oh, and if the Eastern European stereotype at least SOUNDS familiar, he should. That’s Alex Winter — aka the OTHER guy in all those “Bill and Ted” movies.