Here we go again, with another title from somewhere down Memory Lane, and this time I’m going a fair way’s back.
My folks, my late father especially, loved The Blues Brothers (1980), as well as being fans of that era’s Saturday Night Live…you know, back when it was Good. That being said, the cinematic team-up of John Belushi (Animal House) and Dan Aykroyd (Ghostbusters) seemed like money in the bank, and was, especially after the hit that was The Blues Brothers…which then led to THIS…’movie’…that would be released just months before Belushi would have his final and fatal encounter with illicit pharmaceuticals.
As with many of these older flicks, I recall seeing this one only once, when my parents decided to add it to one of our VHS rental nights sometime in the mid-80’s and I recall being…confused…by what Neighbors tried to pass off as comedy. Of course, I was only in my single digits at the time and undoubtedly many of the more risque’ ‘jokes’ would’ve passed straight over my silly little noggin, but I recall many other comedy’s from the same time period that succeeded in their humour, even for me at that age, at that time. This one did not leave a warm residue of memorable comedic sequences, but rather an odd, dark, and very confused tone that managed to overshadow ANYTHING even remotely clever or amusing that the bizarre script tried to throw at us.
Neighbors takes place entirely in a strange two-house suburban cul-de-sac, backdropped by the power-lines from Hell. We focus on ‘Earl’ (John Belushi), an over-weight, middle-age man living what appears to be the most boring life imaginable with his chain-smoking wife ‘Enid’ (Kathryn Walker), on what appears to be an ordinary and soul-crushing evening of instant dinners and mindless television. The excitement is palpable. Into this domestic ‘bliss’ abruptly comes the sounds of people moving into the long-empty house next door, and before long, ‘Earl’ finds himself set upon by the utterly obnoxious and possibly dangerous couple that is psycho ‘Vic’ (Dan Aykroyd) and slutty ‘Ramona’ (Cathy Moriarty), the chaotic new neighbours. And hilarity is supposed to ensue.
Being that I’m thoroughly enjoying going back these days and finding key movies from my past that I haven’t laid eyes on in literally decades, this one bubbled to the surface based on feeling, not memory.
Of the movie itself, I remembered VERY little, beyond the aesthetics. However, it’s the bizarre, mildly-unsettling, slightly-sick feeling that still resonated all these tens of years later, directly tied to that one and only time I laid my little-kid looking-balls on this strange cinematic oddity, that prompted me to seek out it. Added to which, with restorations and clean-up of older title’s being a very cool thing these days, I’m also deeply curious to see just how good these older, shot-on-actual-film flicks can look, given the right amount of TLC given prior to a Blu ray or 4K re-release. So, a quick search yielded a recently-released Blu ray edition (designed to resemble a worn VHS cover…which was cool) that luckily did not boast a heavy price-tag so I figured ‘what the hell’, and scored one.
Needing to decompress from the stress I was dealing with, revolving around the sudden acting up of my prized conveyance’s guts, with Monday and work right around the corner, I figured a couple solid puffs off a joint and a Comedy from Years Gone By might be just the ticket to break me out of my funk.
Another of several miscalculation’s I’ve made recently. Clearly off my game, for…reasons?
C’mon, Cosmos…give a brutha a break, yo!
Mind happily numbed by a solid sativa strain, I got my two K9 girls situated, grabbed my pad and pen…and hit PLAY.
Those scribbles…
-Weird intro music. Circus-like. The tone is confused right from the get-go.
-Conti’s score is too much already. Every scene. And I do mean ‘every scene’, at least for the majority of Acts One and Two. It never seems to stop…even in scenes that either simply don’t need music or require different music, preferably without on-the-nose comedic cues scattered throughout. Composer Bill Conti HAS done some solid scores before, with his music for 1999’s The Thomas Crown Affair remake standing out for me. But this…this is annoying garbage, through and through.
-Endless cartoonish score suggests no faith in the humour. No bullshit on ‘cartoonish’ either, with literal cartoon sound effects secreted throughout the overly brassy and weirdly boisterous score, usually used to punctuate lame visual gags. Emotional manipulation is expected with a film’s score (kinda the point, really), but here, it was like they were using it to make certain we ‘got’ what they were trying (and failing) to convey as comedy, as they knew what they were attempting didn’t have the chops to stand on its own as a joke, gag, or idea.
-This needs to end with murders! It would seem like a logical direction for this narrative to go, given how intolerable the overall scenario rapidly becomes, almost threateningly so.
-Every character obnoxious as hell. They are. True story.
-Aykroyd’s contacts freaky. Dan Aykroyd is one of those mutated freaks with eyes of differing colors, leaning on the darker side. Here, as ‘Vic’, he wears odd-looking bright blue contacts that just didn’t sit right with me.
-Non-human interactions. No ‘character’ here feels like a real human being and that’s especially evident in how they all interact, scene to scene.
-A murder / suicide is this flick’s final answer. Or should be. There it is again. Not a popular sentiment in this day and age…but still.
-Belushi already looks like a serial killer, so… He does have a bit of a Gacy or Son of Sam thing going already, even before the bullshit hits the fan, so should he have been finally pushed to something murderous…he already looks the part.
-Dead Kennedy’s?! Ok, that’s cool. A glimmer of genuine ‘cool’, as I picked out the sounds of a key track from one of the pioneers of true early 80’s punk, that being the Dead Kennedy’s. Incidentally, I just happen to own both the CD and the vinyl for the album the track is from…look how trendy I am.
-Earl, you horny idiot. Ramona again. She keeps hitting on him, for her own ends, using his own unsatisfied libido against him and he keeps fucking falling for it. *shakes head sadly*
-Movie does NOT know what it’s supposed to be. Quite simply, the tone and intent seem all over the place and I blame the cocaine.
-WTF? Buddies now? Lame. After ALL that? Who the fuck wrote this?!
-‘Earl’s pure cuck. A total pussy. Nothing comes together for the character of ‘Earl’, as written, directed, and performed. Belushi seems nut-less and incapable of definitive action, combined with how much abuse he simply allows to have heaped upon him by everyone around him, right up to the final shot. He takes ‘go along to get along’ to humiliating, self-neutering levels.
-Again…WTF?! This one exists as a rather wide-sweeping synapses of my overall experience Revisiting Neighbors.
-A seriously unfunny ‘comedy’. This cuts right to the bone in a way that I cannot expand upon further.
Yikes.
All in all, this turned out worse than I expected. I didn’t exactly go in with sky-high hopes but damn, my adult eyes judged this one harshly. And…deservedly so. Neighbors is a failure, in almost every respect.
There is some merit in the argument regarding the allegedly liberal use of Peruvian Marching Powder on set, as apparently EVERYONE was jazzed up on that shit. It’s been credibly reported that it was the coke-fuelled shenanigans on the already troubled set that led to the relapse that would ultimately kill John Belushi on March 5th, 1982, only months after this one was shat upon the public.
Just say No, kids…as THIS is what copious amounts of snow will do to your ‘movie’…and life.
Where to begin – ALL the performances suck, ALL the characters are obnoxious cartoon characters with no real semblance of humanity, the setting is dull and uninspired, the cinematography has no real character aside from occasionally being outlandish just to be outlandish, and that fucking score. This is one of the most blatantly annoying and childishly manipulative music scores I’ve literally EVER heard and, on that merit alone, I can’t see myself ever willingly watching this one again…though I do plan to keep it in the library as an interesting cinematic ‘curio’; a notorious failure in among the hits (much like another cinematic turd from that period I have on DVD – 1941, incidentally also starring Belushi and Aykroyd. Fuck you, 1941, you hateful piece of shit!).
It is a shame that this was the last film in Belushi’s now-legendary / infamous filmography and it’s lucky for Aykroyd that his luck changed for the better in the following years, especially in ’84, with a little-known movie called Ghostbusters, because this shit is embarrassing…and there’s a reason this one lives in obscurity, barely mentioned in the pop-culture lexicon, and when it is…it’s rarely for good reasons.
The only way I can recommend Neighbors is to either A) those who feel the soul-affirming need to complete the entire filmographies of either Belushi or Aykroyd, for better or worse, or B) those with a masochistic streak, a burning curiosity, and the patience to be willingly subjected to undeniable failure for 1 hours and 34 minutes.
To everyone else, just go check out the 2014 flick of the same name with Seth Rogen and Zac Efron…at least there’s genuinely funny shit in that one. Leave this one on the curb in the trash can of History.
