Neighbors
1981VOTE NOW
| Columbia Pictures | Release Date: December 18, 1981 |
Starring:
Cathy Moriarty, Dan Aykroyd, Dru-Ann Chuckran, Henry Judd Baker, Igors Gavon, John Belushi, Kathryn Walker, P.L. Brown, Tim Kazurinsky, Tino Insana
Movie Facts:
- A box-office disappointment, this was to be Belushi's last picture. A few months after its release at Christmas, he was dead of a drug overdose. - TV Guide
Summary:
A quiet man's peaceful suburban lifestyle is threatened by the new, obnoxious couple that moves in next door.
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The first hour of Neighbors is probably more fun than the second, if only because the plot developments come as a series of surprises. After a while, the bizarre logic of the movie becomes more predictable. But Neighbors is a truly interesting comedy, an offbeat experiment in hallucinatory black humor. It grows on you.
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Once in the proper mood for Neighbors, however, the disappointing discovery is that there isn't a lot of movie there. Neighbors is by no means a laughless debacle like "Buddy Buddy," and as an ambiguous paranoid rattle around life's great cage, the film is funnier and less pretentious than "Being There." It's just too bad that it tends to send you home empty-headed.[24 Dec 1981, p.C1]
The situation that Neighbors starts off with is funnier than anything that grows out of it, at least the version of the tale by Mr. Avildsen's and Larry Gelbart, the screenwriter. While Mr. Berger's novel has an aspect of the mysterious to keep it going, the film is solely devoted to hijinks, and the hijinks have nowhere to go.
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In concert with composer Bill Conti and scriptwriter Larry Gelbart,
Neighbors has become a hyper insult festival in which four people
pointlessly humiliate each other in a variety of increasingly vicious
ways. Sample dialogue: "Leave that warthead alone. C'mon, we've got
cesspools to suck." It's enough to make you nostalgic for the Shavian wit
of The Gong Show, for the genteel grace of Saturday afternoon wrestling. [19 Dec 1981]
The ads for Neighbors call it "a comic nightmare"; it's more like a sour case of creative indigestion. [21 Dec 1981, p.51]
Mar 20, 2023
This review contains spoilers, click expand to view.
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