For going on five months now, Nicholas Stoller’s film “Neighbors” starring Seth Rogen and Zac Efron has been promoted and hyped as one of the funniest movies of the year. A week into release, it appears critics and movie audiences agree.
In the film, Rogen and Efron play opposites who live next door to each other and grow to resent each other’s inconsiderate antics. For those who are old enough to remember the early years of “Saturday Night Live” and “The Blue Brothers,” comedians John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd also teamed up 33 years earlier to lead another comedic suburban flick called “Neighbors.”
Bad living situations has been a theme that has proved to be not only successful in comedies but also suspense/thrillers. For those who liked the latest “Neighbors” film and/or are looking for other similar toned movies, there are a few.
Also in the same decade as the first Neighbors movie were the Tom Hanks appearances in “The Money Pit” with Shelley Long and “The ’Burbs,” co-starring Carrie Fisher. Both films deal with couples in unfortunate living conditions. In “The Money Pit,” Hanks and Long fail to rebuild their house. In “The ’Burbs,” Hanks and Fisher live next door to possible cannibals.
In Danny DeVito’s nearly forgotten “Duplex,” Ben Stiller and Drew Barrymore live below an elderly lady who holds the on-screen couple back from moving into their dream condo and causing more problems than favors.
Vacation settings with asinine tag-alongs also have been put to screen effectively, such as Bill Murray not leaving Richard Dreyfuss alone in Frank Oz’s cult comedy “What About Bob?” and Dan Aykroyd playing another nuisance in-law to John Candy’s family while camping in John Hughes’ “The Great Outdoors.”
For viewers interested in a less comedic route for nightmare neighbors, there is Roman Polanski’s classic horror film “Rosemary’s Baby” with Mia Farrow as the pregnant housewife who begins to feel strange after meeting the older married couple across the hall. Incompetent tenant Michael Keaton terrorized married landlords Matthew Modine and Melanie Griffith in John Schlesinger’s “Pacific Heights,” and prejudiced cop Samuel L. Jackson harassed Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington in Neil LaBute’s “Lakeview Terrace.”
Probably the most gruesome of home disturbances on screen is Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs” and Rod Lurie’s remake in 2011. The films feature Dustin Hoffman and Susan George in the original, and James Marsden and Kate Bosworth in the remake as newlyweds who move into small towns and aren’t welcomed kindly by the locals. Neither is for the faint at heart, but both seem to have cult followings.
Despite how unnerving the situation might be in real life, home dysfunction can make for decent comedy and thrillers.
mbianco@durangoherald.com. Megan Bianco is a movie reviewer and also contributes other entertainment related features and articles.
