Destroy All Neighbors
Recent years have seen a rise in the popularity of independently made horror films that mix goofy comedy with gory violence. Kids vs. Aliens, There’s Something in the Barn, and Totally Killer are a few examples. I often like these movies. Destroy All Neighbors is different, though. It starts off with a lot of promise before getting stuck in a rut it never gets out of.
William Brown (Jonah Ray Rodrigues) is a failed prog rock musician who works at a recording studio. He hopes to convince his boss (Thomas Lennon) that a new piece he’s writing is awesome. Finishing that piece becomes impossible when a new tenant moves into the apartment next door. Vlad (Alex Winter) looks like the unholy union of Popeye and a garden gnome, and he blasts obnoxious music at all hours of the night. Things go disastrously wrong when William confronts Vlad, leading to a series of deaths, reincarnations, and severed limbs that act on their own free will.
The set-up in Destroy All Neighbors is fun. It utilizes a classic convention where Vlad is nice to everyone except William. That leads to problems when William’s girlfriend Emily (Kiran Deol) falls under Vlad’s spell. Winter is quite amusing as the boisterous new resident, giving a humorously over-the-top performance that leaves him virtually unrecognizable underneath prosthetics. By the time the character starts to unleash hell upon William, we’re primed for outrageous entertainment.
What we get, however, are a few basic jokes repeated over and over. There are only so many gags you milk out of prog rock’s weirdness. Ditto for ones about Vlad’s desire to torment William, body parts crawling around, and a pig running through the building. The movie keeps treading the same ground, to the point where the big finale lacks the comedic punch it’s clearly intended to have. In fact, it seems to go on endlessly. Nothing is less funny than a premise that wears out its welcome.
Destroy All Neighbors does have impressive practical effects that are cool to look at. Those effects still can’t prop up a story that spins its wheels. The good time offered at the beginning quickly evaporates, causing the film to grow stale by the halfway point.
out of four
Destroy All Neighbors is unrated, but contains strong language and graphic violence. The running time is 1 hour and 25 minutes.
