Josh Forbes’ uneven horror-comedy goes nowhere after a while, but has fun getting there.
Apartment life means having to give up most expectations of peace and quiet. I’ve had a neighbor who spent most of his days listening to disco music set at eleven on the volume dial, occasionally letting out a joyful “woo!” Another would tunelessly noodle on a keyboard for hours at a time. A third sounded as if he offered Irish step dancing lessons for extra income. Some people talk a good game about not putting up with noise, but most of us just learn to deal with it, usually by grumbling about it and making our own noise to cover it up.
Every now and then, however, a person will just snap, and then you end up with Destroy All Neighbors, a likably silly horror-comedy that compensates for a lack of plot and character development with gory practical effects and a memorable performance by Alex Winter.
William Brown (Jonah Ray Rodrigues) is a put-upon sound engineer who’s been spending the past three years attempting to record his own prog rock album, but can’t complete the final track. Rather than give up that particular track, he keeps fruitlessly plugging away at it, to the chagrin of his girlfriend, Emily (Kiran Deol). Refusing to accept that the track is a dud, the passive-aggressive William prefers to just complain instead, about his job, his apartment, and his life in general, insisting that it’s all getting in the way of his creativity..
A new and very different distraction arrives in the form of Vlad (Alex Winter), who moves into the apartment next door to William’s and aggressively makes his presence known. Evidently never needing to sleep, Vlad blasts electronic dance music at all hours of the day and night, sounds like he’s swinging a sledgehammer around his living room, and bellows as if he’s passing a kidney stone. William is reluctant to confront Vlad directly, but when their landlady (Randee Heller) refuses to get involved, and a visit from the police goes nowhere, he’s forced to take action.
“Take action” means getting into a fight with Vlad, who is accidentally killed when he slips and impales himself on homemade exercise equipment, then knocks his own head off with a cinderblock. It’s unclear why William feels he needs to treat an obvious accident like a crime scene to clean up, including dismembering and disposing of Vlad’s body, but that seems to be part of an overall running gag: everything he does to try to “fix” whatever situation he’s in only makes things worse. This includes trying to cover up Vlad’s death, which quickly results in more corpses stacking up, all of which, including Vlad, return from the dead to taunt him.
I’m not sure there’s much to sell anyone on Destroy All Neighbors beyond the jokes and gore, which is reminiscent of the cartoonish style of Peter Jackson’s Dead/Alive and Bad Taste, but I’m also not sure anything more is needed. Shudder’s original content is wildly hit or miss, and even with a meandering plot that sputters out barely halfway through its 85 minute running time, it’s still more on the side of “hit.” This is due mostly to the gags, such as William seeking comfort from videos of prog rock legend Swig Anderson (Jon Daly), who seems to be addressing him directly at times, or when William is harassed by the voices of his victims on his car radio, including one who describes himself as a “long time liver, first time die-er.”
Much of Destroy All Neighbors wouldn’t succeed if not for Alex Winter, unrecognizable in full head-to-toe makeup that makes him look like a slimmed down version of Fat Bastard, and speaking in an often indecipherable Eastern European accent. He comes off as a mischievous troll (the fairy tale kind, not the internet kind) who will either offer you a beer or smash the bottle over your head, it’s impossible to predict. Vlad would fit in perfectly in Winter’s underrated Freaked (which this movie resembles), and it’s entirely possible he did drop out of the traveling carnival circuit directly into William’s life.
Though it doesn’t really run with it, there’s some suggestion that William’s passive “I’m just trying to be the good guy here” nature is to blame for much of what happens. Indeed, even before crossing paths with Vlad, his life is mostly a series of encounters with condescending co-workers, hostile homeless people, and a landlady who uses him as free labor, all of which he meekly accepts, only complaining about it to Emily later.
He’s annoyed at her suggestion that he try standing up for himself, even though the stress of everyday life is interfering with his work. It makes William an interesting protagonist: we know perfectly well that all of this could have been avoided, and his whining passivity is infuriating, and yet, how many of us are truly willing to step up and tell someone – a neighbor, a co-worker, etc. – that we’ve had enough? He turns out to be unexpectedly relatable.
Destroy All Neighbors premieres on Shudder January 12th.