DESTROY ALL NEIGHBORS (2024)

Studio:   Shudder
Director: Josh Forbes
Writer:   Charles Pieper, Jared Logan, Mike Benner
Producer: Alex Winter, Jonah Ray Rodrigues, Russell Sanzgiri
Stars:    Jonah Ray Rodrigues, Alex Winter, Kiran Deol, Christian Calloway, Randee Heller, DeMorge Brown, Jon Daly, Phil Hendrie, Ryan Kattner, Thomas Lennon

Review Score:

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Summary:

A frustrated musician descends into a surreal spiral after a neighbor's accidental murder triggers a domino line of seemingly reanimated corpses.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Struggling prog rock musician William Brown starts his morning with a series of encounters with Emily, his live-in lawyer girlfriend, Eleanor Prescott, his apartment building manager who often tasks William with handyman jobs, Alec, a nepo-baby screenwriter in the process of moving out, and Phillip, a neighbor nicknamed "Pig Man" because he owns an emotional support pig. On his drive to work, William listens to inspirational instructional videos by his guitar hero "Swig" Anderson, the former bass player from Dawn Dimension.

Outside the recording studio where he works as an audio engineer, William has another of his regular encounters with homeless man Auggie. Inside the studio, William tries playing his latest composition for his boss Scott, but he ends up belittled by egotistical recording artist Caleb Bang Jansen.

William returns home to discover he has a grotesque and disturbingly loud new neighbor named Vlad. Following an altercation with Vlad as well as Eleanor's refusal to do anything about Vlad's incessant noise, William calls the cops. However, Officers Ponds and McCormick refuse to act after arriving to find Vlad in a friendly conversation with Emily. Vlad then taunts William behind Emily's back.

Caleb Bang Jansen compels subservient Scott to fire William. Back at home, William and Emily have an argument. Motivated by his collective frustration, William has another confrontation with Vlad. Vlad prompts a physical fight that ends with William inadvertently killing Vlad, who falls on a pole that stakes his torso while triggering his own decapitation.

William starts disposing the body parts when Vlad seemingly reanimates to begin talking to him. Unable to bribe a security guard to get into a smelting refinery where he could burn the body, William brings Vlad's pieces to the recording studio. In the parking lot, Vlad's reanimated foot causes William to run over and kill Auggie. William subsequently discovers Auggie was actually his guitar hero "Swig" Anderson.

Auggie also seemingly reanimates. William still dumps both bodies down a ravine in the woods.

William returns home to learn Eleanor accidentally electrocuted herself because he wasn't there to help with the fuse box, Emily is moving out, and Vlad and Auggie somehow made it back to the building. Questioning his sanity, William gives up and decides to party with Vlad and Auggie. William tells Vlad and Auggie his philosophy on prog rock and plays them his music.

Phillip comes over to complain about the noise. William and Phillip struggle over a record that breaks and punctures Phillip's neck. In self-defense, William finishes off Phillip by stabbing him with sharp objects. Emily unexpectedly walks in on the accidental murder, although Phillip later reanimates.

The cops arrest William, who subsequently shares a jail cell with his previous neighbor Alec. However, William is swiftly released as his public defender informs him no bodies were found at the apartment building despite Emily's claims.

William goes to the morgue to identify Eleanor's charred corpse. Eleanor suddenly reanimates and motivates William to finally finish his prog rock album. Upon returning home with her, William collects the other three reanimated ghouls and takes them to the studio where they force Scott and Caleb Bang Jansen to help William's newfound "band" record his album.

A SWAT team arrives outside to get William to release the two hostages. Police Captain Entenille has Emily try negotiating with William through a bullhorn, but Emily ends up stalling for William after they reconcile over their broken relationship.

While William races to finish recording, Vlad transforms into a monstrous beast after calling William a loser, taunting his inability to complete his music, and admitting he called the cops. More driven than ever, William finishes his album as cops storm the building to take him into custody. Vlad explodes.

William goes to prison, but later wins an Album of the Year award that Scott and Caleb Bang Jansen accept on his behalf. Now serving as his lawyer, Emily visits William to ask how he managed to finish the album in spite of everything. Looking at a vision of the reanimated ghosts over her shoulder, William responds that he had help from friends. Emily leaves William with a device that he uses to continue making music in his cell.

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Review:

Any review I write for a horror-comedy can be taken with a grain of salt since I'm traditionally a tough sell whenever those two genres are blended together. Even still, "Destroy All Neighbors" seems like a tougher sell than usual. It's not for the common reasons, which would be painfully unfunny gags or juvenile jokes. It's more that "Destroy All Neighbor's" middling comedy comes from a shoulder-shrugging "eh, is that all this movie's got?" sense of ho-hum humor.

William Brown (Jonah Ray Rodrigues) lives the underachieving life of a stereotypical schlub. He's a simple sound engineer with starry-eyed dreams of making his musical mark in prog rock, a niche that's definitely dying if it's not already dead. By contrast, his girlfriend Emily (Kiran Deol) sees much more success as an attorney, and she's clearly dating below her pay grade by sticking it out with sad sack William.

The two of them are almost literally slumming it in a cramped apartment building whose trampled carpets compete with cracked walls for which has gone longest without a cleaning. The building also keeps its kook factor cranked up to 11 with a whole host of easy-to-describe oddballs who compete with each other for the title of Most Cliched Character.

In order of appearance, notable neighbors include Eleanor (Randee Heller), a horny old landlord dressed like a grandma at Woodstock who takes up William's time by constantly assigning him unpaid handyman tasks. In the process of moving out, Alec was a struggling screenwriter until his erotic sci-fi thriller sold thanks to his father's friend "who wrote a couple Jurassic Parks." Phillip earned the nickname "Pig Man" thanks to the emotional support animal he houses next door. William also gets inspiration from the instructional videos of his guitar hero "Swig" Anderson (Jon Daly), the burnout bassist of a forgotten band whose soberest days are long behind him.

Not to be outdone in the affable weirdo department, the recording studio where William works keeps colorful encounters coming. When he's not spouting Crazy Ralph nuttiness, parking lot hobo Auggie regularly hassles William for a croissant. William's boss Scott (Thomas Lennon) initially appears more receptive than most to William's latest electronic composition. But Scott swiftly boards the bandwagon of insults when coke-crazed, egomaniac artist Caleb Bang Jansen (Ryan Kattner) provides putdowns like only a guy who once had a song on "The OC" can.

Then there's Vlad. Alec's exit opened a vacancy filled by a cross between Tom Savini's "Creepshow 2" Creep and a burly dwarf if The Asylum ever did a mockoff of "Lord of the Rings." Vlad is the quintessential neighbor from Hell, not only disgusting, but disgustingly noisy. And when Eleanor, Emily, and the cops all refuse to do anything about the noxious nuisance, William takes matters into his own hands. Except those matters turn into murder after one of their altercations turns physical, and Vlad is inadvertently impaled before a homemade weightlifting contraption knocks off his noggin for good measure.

Sounds like the end of their newfound feud, but Vlad's violent demise becomes the beginning of new trouble for William. Inexplicably, Vlad's head seemingly reanimates to resume his terrible taunting, and his body parts grow minds of their own, too. William accidentally knocked over a domino line that's going to ripple increasingly outward in wild ways, as dealing with Vlad's boisterous body leads to the creation of more corpses, and no neighbor is safe from William's accident-prone antics when Vlad keeps kickstarting macabre mischief.

Once frenetic activity escalates, "Destroy All Neighbors" shows that it's a back-loaded movie whose second half comes across stronger in both horror and humor than the first half. The support staff sheds their one-note human personalities to turn into ghostly monstrosities who tease, terrorize, and even motivate William to get over his self-made anxieties and finally finish his album. The knock-on effect allows the film to loosen up a little more. It was already askew, yet the full flip into William's possibly insane imagination opens the door to totally surreal splatter and silliness.

I hate writing wrap-ups that open on "like I said" because that merely means I'm repeating myself. I also dislike the label "your mileage may vary" because that applies to virtually every movie, and I feel like I use it too often. But like I said, however, the room temperature humor and rough-edged horror make "Destroy All Neighbors" a YMMV movie if ever there was one.

Speaking for myself, I never laughed out loud once. I don't think I even came close. Smirks curled corners of my mouth here and there, with the first being when Kumail Nanjiani popped up in a quick cameo to rattle off likely improvised lines that landed better than all other dialogue in the preceding half-hour. That's a long time to get to anything close to "good stuff" in a comedy. And when you've got wordplay such as a police chief named Captain Entenille, a reference ready to speed right over the head of anyone born after the 1970s, you're not exactly swimming in gutbuster goofs.

All of these notes bear mentioning because "Destroy All Neighbors" benefits from a precise calibration of a viewer's mindset beforehand, preferably influenced by that person's vice of choice, if you know what I mean. In addition to the style of comedy in store, it's equally worth knowing that "Destroy All Humans" bears visible indie origins. Echoing an earlier reference, the movie's confinement to a few small rooms and 20 feet of hallway makes for modest production value treading somewhere between an old episode of "Tales from the Darkside" and a new episode of "Creepshow." That's not necessarily a knock. Just another thing to keep in mind when considering if "Destroy All Humans" is the right white-label brand of mildly off-the-wall entertainment for you.

Review Score: 50

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