| Metropolitan Filmexport | Release Date: October 1, 1985 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
4
Mixed:
1
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews
A very well made, disorienting movie about inarticulated despair and utter hopelessness. It reminds me a lot of ''Over the Edge,'' Jonathan Kaplan's bleak, bitter picture of teen-age life in an architecturally perfect, California housing development. Unlike ''Over the Edge,'' however, The Boys Next Door is less interested in causes than in effects, which Penelope Spheeris, the director, turns into the photographic record of a grim, vivid, joyless ride to hell.
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Whereas Spheeris' The Wild Side was weakened by sentimentalising its disaffected punk heroes, her second feature presents a tougher and more balanced view of teen violence; while we're allowed a glimmer of understanding into the murderers' feelings, we never indulge them with misplaced sympathies: these boys are monsters.
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The Boys Next Door is a dark, forbidding vision--perhaps too harsh for audiences accustomed to more frivolous pictures of teen high jinks. But its lack of sentimentality gives it a rugged moral force--it doesn’t soften the twisted fury that sends these kids careening into a crazed death trip.
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The Boys Next Door is just another exploitation movie about murderous nuts -- exactly what you wouldn't expect from Penelope Spheeris, the director of "Suburbia." [12 Nov 1985, p.B11]
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