Guest Blogger Thursday

This is my roommate Steve's guest blog for today.

It's not just bad - it's 'Neighbors' Bad!

Today, I'd like to rap about one of my favorite movies. Wait a minute! Did I
just say that? "Favorite movies"? Well, I suppose it qualifies, in a
perverse sort of way. 'Neighbors'- from back in the ancient year of 1981 -
is, without a doubt, the worst film I have ever seen in my entire life. (At
least, the worst of all the mainstream movies - that, you know, have real
actors in them, and an actual budget.) And yet, it's awful in such a
particular, peculiar way that I find it worth seeing anyhow. And this
discrepancy may just say something about me - or else, it might serve to
illuminate something about the way movies are, or at least can be,
"enjoyed."

Let me set the scene for you. It was late at night in my third year of
college. I'd just gotten off a heavy-studying bender, and had slept it off
for most of the rest of the evening, waking up around midnight. Bored, I
flicked on my roommate's TV, flipped around a bit, and found this movie.
Now, I'd always been a fan of John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, and had always
vaguely wondered about this movie, but somehow never got up the head of
steam to ever rent it or seek it out. And I quickly found out why.

As I began watching, the movie was just getting underway. Belushi, playing
mild-mannered Earl Keese, is just coming home from his day in the workaday,
white-collar, nine-to-five world - harried and beaten down, perhaps, but
relieved at the prospect of settling into his suburban homestead. Except
that this "suburb" where he lives is like no other -- rather, he lives in an
out of the way cul-de-sac, with a heavy duty power line running through the
backyard pumping out overwatted electrical signals, and a "pond" at the end
of the block which is really quicksand-like goop that is runoff from the
city toxic waste dump.

So, ok. The film is obviously after some dark vision of the suburbs, and its
underlying eeriness, as well as the soul-crushing tedium it inspires. We've
been here before, and since - just think, oh I don't know, just off the top
of my head: 'Blue Velvet,' 'Edward Scissorhands,' 'Donnie Darko,' 'American
Beauty,' 'The Graduate,' . . . does Hollywood ever have anything GOOD to say
about the suburbs? I guess most of us grew up in hell, huh?

But no matter. That's the movie's jumping-off point, and that's fine. What
really becomes inexplicable is what the filmmakers offer up as the antidote
to this staid and vapid life. For, no sooner has Earl come home than he is
confronted by the new 'neighbors' that have moved into the empty house next
door. And with their introduction, the film flies straight off the rails and
doesn't look back. These two loonies are portrayed by Dan Aykroyd, with an
awful blonde dye-job that you're not sure is just ineptness on the part of
the makeup department or whether its grotesquerie is making some sort of
"point" (but what could that point be?) and Cathy Moriarity - who was
wonderful in her film debut the year before as Jake LaMotta's wife in
'Raging Bull' but with this film starts down the road to her true vocation
as the tough cookie-cum-sexpot-harpy-tramp in a series of the most shrill
and overbloated pictures of the last twenty years. Seeing Moriarity in a
film is almost a sure sign that someone in the creative department didn't
want an actual character - but rather an over-the-top and ham-fisted 'type.'

That's certainly the part she plays here, for Ramona becomes Earl's
temptress. She comes on to him like gangbusters, seeking to get him into all
manner of erotic clinches as the evening progresses - only to leave him
hanging at the last minute. Or else to be somehow pre-empted by Vic
(Aykroyd's character), who jolts Earl into a series of verbal and physical
sparring matches throughout the evening in an attempt to . . . well, to . .
. um, do something, right? Shake Earl up, break him out of his rut. But the
pranks and jests on display here are just so . . . random, and meaningless,
that they make no overall sense, either logically or comically. First, Vic
tricks Earl out of twenty bucks to go get dinner at a restaurant that
doesn't exist, pockets the cash and goes over to his own house to make a
sloppy plate of spaghetti, passing it off as take-out food. Now, what's the
point? If Vic is trying to scam Earl out of money, why only twenty bucks?
And how is this exactly shaking up Earl's life? No, it's just bizarre.
Later, Vic shoots at Earl from a makeshift gun turret on the top of his
house. He flies his mechanical toy plane around Earl's yard and through his
house; he pushes Earl into the quicksand pond, locks him in his basement,
attacks him in the shower, and even - over a kitchen table heart-to-heart -
makes him drink coffee in an unwashed cup, in one of the most unusual and
pointless scenes you'll ever see.

The point is, there's absolutely no context for anything these neighbors do.
Ramona gets him hot and bothered, Vic terrorizes him - but it's all so
unmotivated, and serves no ultimate goal. Further, there's no real internal
consistency to the way any of the characters behave (particularly Earl's
wife, who perpetually seems to side with these new neighbhors, even though
she shares nothing of their wildness or creepiness) - so you're never on any
firm ground in knowing either what's going to happen next, or in caring
about it anyway. The film becomes a random series of (would-be) "dark"
incidents, with no driving momentum or final payoff (and, most certainly, no
laughs)

But I have to say, watching it there in the wee hours of my dorm room, I was
transfixed. Awful as it was, something about this movie just HELD - frozen,
transfixed, hypnotized. I surmised quickly that it wasn't very good - but
then it just kept getting worse - and WORSE . . . and worse again. For two
hours, this movie continually one-upped itself in badness and pointlessness
- until I actually started to groove on it.

I mean, usually when a movie doesn't work, you can at least see what the
filmmakers had in mind, and then can assess where it went wrong (weak
concept, poor script, actors not right for the roles, etc). But here, I have
no idea - I mean absolutely NO IDEA - what anyone thought they were trying
to do in the first place. And yet it's not just some surreal phantasmagoria
either, not meant to be linearly or rationally understood (I think of a
movie like 'Eraserhead' here) - no, the actions and dialogue is too
maddeningly literal for that. I have my own special theory about this film.
I maintain that it wasn't made to entertain at all. It was made with the
specific intent of having its financial backers shit bricks and squirm in
their seats. I can just see Belushi and Aykroyd as they watched the suits at
the studio viewing the final cut of this movei for the first time, giggling
proudly to themselves and exclaiming, "Ha! I DARE you guys to actually try
and market this piece of crap!" And I have to say, when I imagine the movie
in that context, it does make me laugh - because it has been so thoroughly
devised so as to appeal to absolutely nobody!

Since first seeing it, I have turned some of my good friends on to this
movie (Adam included), and amongst ourselves we have devised a new film
rating. If a movie is just bad, that's one thing - but if it's 'NEIGHBORS'
BAD, then that's something entirely else again. A movie that's 'Neighbors'
bad is one which looks liek it's actually working harder to be awful than it
is to be good (and that's not as easy to do as you might think; a lack of
quality due to ineptness is explicable, but to actually ENGINEER and
structure badness, so that it acquires a total cumulative effect - now, that
takes talent. Doesn't it? It must. I refuse to write off this movie as an
"accident"!). If you're watching a movie whose plot is indecipherable, whose
events and characterizations are completely random, and again and again
frustrates any expectation of arriving at a meaningful conclusion, . . .
then, people, you seeing something that is 'Neighbors' bad - and you should
cherish the experience, because those type of films are (fortunately) very
few and far between.