Destroy All Neighbors (Josh Forbes, 2024) Review

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“Rock and roll is about being on time.” The nightmare neighbour next door with their loud music blasting all through the night while you lie there in bed awake, eyes bloodshot and weary, wanting to put a stop to it and never having the stones to do it. But what if one day you worked up the gumption to bang on that door and tell them to turn it down … and then accidentally killed them?...

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“Well, Mr Knob Turner, maybe you can twiddle my knobs.” William (Jonah Ray, Christmas Bloody Christmas) is an audio technician by day and an aspiring God of prog rock music by night, endlessly tinkering with his terminally unfinished album. Having reached the point of obsession it's beginning to get in the way of his relationship with Emily (Kiran Deol), but he's a nice enough guy, always amenable to his landlord's list of 'quick' chores she needs help with, and yet he's also a bit of a doormat.

“You murdered him by accident?!” Then one day Vlad (an unrecognisable Alex Winter, Freaked) moves in, a curious Eastern European goon of a man who is obsessed with lifting weights to brain-numbing EDM dialled up to wall-trembling eleven. How's a Milquetoast prog rocker supposed to finish their magnum opus? Having finally grown a set of balls, or the nearest approximation to them, William confronts the twirling tornado of chaos that is Vlad – and it all goes arse-up when the nightmare neighbour next door unintentionally becomes skewered on his own makeshift exercise equipment.

“Why? Because fuck you, that's why. I'm not gonna let death stop me from partying.” Now, guided by his prog rock hero Swig (Jon Daly) in the first sign of William's crumbling sanity, he sets about disposing of the body only to discover the severed parts aren't quite as dead as he thought. Is he going insane or is this real, and why do people keep winding up mangled and butchered in his presence?

“I don't know how to work these new vibrators.” // “It's a toothbrush!” Written by Mike Benner, Jared Logan, and Charles A. Pieper, Destroy All Neighbors is destined to become a cult favourite in a similar mold as the movies of filmmakers like Frank Henenlotter. Too many genre movies these days flounder when it comes to characters, brandishing a selection of pretty but bland individuals to say nothing of consequence, do nothing memorable, or just linger around annoying the audience, if they haven't already fallen out of their memory within microseconds.

This film, though, certainly manages to make the most of its relatively small cast, giving them all individual personalities and idiosyncrasies that fit hand-in-glove with the genuinely humorous dialogue. Whether it's small details like the way landlady Eleanor (Randee Heller, The Karate Kid) eats popcorn, prog rock star Swig subtly bemoans his problems between the lines of his instructional videos, or how the weak-willed Scott (Thomas Lennon, Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich) continually about-turns to the beat of Caleb Bang Jansen's (Ryan Kattner) drug-addled drum, every supporting player gets something memorable to do and say, breathing life into each of their scenes.

“I'm not a serial killer! Just a serial manslaughterer at best.” Being a horror comedy, of course, there has to be some blood and guts strewn about somewhere, right? Most certainly, and in-keeping with the Henenlotter vibe of the movie, the make-up effects have been designed by Gabe Bartalos, who has worked on countless genre favourites such as the Leprechaun movies and, back to Frank Henenlotter, Brain Damage and Frankenhooker. This may be a low budget affair, but the film uses that aesthetic to work in classic style practical effects, dousing William with geysers of crimson with every act of bodily dismemberment, while also skewing into the sight of a mangled torso playing the drums with its intestines – yes, indeed!

“I know it's a hassle, but we've gotta go through all this due process crap.” The movie also looks the part, splattered with colourful hues of blue and orange (among others) as if filtered through junk food packaging or the rainbow vomit of a hyperactive kid double-fisting bags of Skittles on a sunny day. However, even with all that brash vigour, the film is not without the odd stumble. The third act feels like the movie is somewhat running out of steam, unsure of how to appropriately wrap everything up to some degree, but the cracks are papered-over nicely by the general sense of madness – embodied by Alex Winter in full-body make-up as the dangerously unpredictable Vlad, deviously stealing his scenes whether as a severed head propped on a shelf or as a hairy, vest-wearing maniac violently wrestling a couch through a doorway. Shudder's latest film may occasionally be a bit messy, a little rough around the edges, but there's more than enough bizarre humour and glee-filled splatter to wash the viewer through the efficient running time to secure it as a quirky cult favourite. Well worth checking out.