The last year has seen two attempts to resurrect seemingly dead and interred subgenres of Nineties horror. First, Joe Lynch got the blood pumping on the erotic horror in his carnal/charnel delight, Suitable Flesh. Now Destroy All Neighbors tries to revive the splatterpunk comedy and, well, maybe the voltage should have been higher on the cardiac paddles.
Although writer/director Josh Forbes is best known as a music video director for Walk the Moon and Carly Rae Jepsen, he’s at least had experience with practical effects on 2016’s zombie STD gorefest Contracted: Phase II. So maybe it’s the comedy part that eludes him as he throws failed prog musician-turned-low-rent studio engineer William Brown (Rodrigues) into conflict with troll-like new neighbor Vlad (Winter, under layers of prosthetics) who insists on blasting EDM at all hours of the day and night through the cardboard-thin walls of their apartment building. A nebulously racist sight gag (pick an ethnic stereotype, any ethnic stereotype, or at least a singular accent), Vlad pokes and prods “Villie,” as he mockingly dubs him, until the milquetoast muso finally loses his cool and accidentally decapitates his nosy neighbor. Not that being headless stops Vlad from being a continuing thorn in the side of poor William, or of this mirthless, heavy-handed indie comedy, even as more bodies pile up and return to keep ragging on William.
Recurrent jokes about prog, small ear canals, prog, gooey organs, prog, annoying neighbors, and prog can’t raise even a smirk. Nor can dull cameos by Thomas Lennon and Kumail Nanjiani get the blood pumping on this cooled-off comedy cadaver. It all feels like an in-joke, appealing to some weird subset in the Venn diagram of “people who find bassists funny” and “people who want to see a less slimy version of puke-laugh-era Peter Jackson.” For those three people, this is the movie for you, but for most people old enough to remember both Idle Hands and Ozric Tentacles, the run time is better spent trying to forget both of them and this film (anyone too young for either should count themselves lucky). Destroy All Neighbors feels old and tattered, incapable of summoning the crackling chaos of great “terrible neighbor” flicks like The ’Burbs, Joe’s Apartment, or the Belushi/Aykroyd social satire Neighbors, which oddly feels like an influence here. But even the Blues Brothers on their worst day (and there are many arguments to be made that their ill-considered suburban satire was exactly that) had an edgy fire to them. Destroy All Neighbors has all the verve of a blood clot.
This article appears in January 12 • 2024.
