Customer Reviews

The Boys Next Door

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This an exceptional, virtually unknown film written by Glen Morgan and James Wong (who have produced and written numerous X-Files episodes) and was directed by Penelope Spheeris with gritty realism. It's the story of two outcast high school graduates who decide to take a short vacation the weekend before they are to start work at a local factory. It is soon revealed that one of the young men is somewhat disturbed and fed up with the way life has treated him and decides to take revenge on the world. The results are insightful and frightening. What is so interesting about this film is that it is presented from two perspectives. The character of Roy, played wonderfully by Maxwell Caulfield, is driven over the edge to the point where he can not be saved, while Bo, Charlie Sheen in a surprisingly good performance, gets so swept up in Roy's chaos that he loses sight of the fact that the things they are doing are wrong. This is a very chilling and realistic portrayel of the isolation and confusion that young people face everyday and how being tormented often leads to violent response. Many films have dealt with this issue before, but very few have been as truthful and effective as Boys Next Door.

Before Penelope Spheeris's directed "Wayne's World," she made another film about a pair of young men. "The Boys Next Door," though, contains little of the offbeat humor that marked the Dana Carvey/Mike Meyers collaboration. You won't find subtle and not so subtle pop culture references punctuated with over the top antics in "The Boys Next Door." Nor will you hear a single reference to "party on." In a way, "The Boys Next Door" resembles Spheeris's other films, namely "The Decline of Western Civilization," in that it looks closely at the sort of young people we don't normally see on television or in the print media. In the case of "Decline," Spheeris examined the effects of punk rock music on select members of America's youth. In "Boys Next Door," it's how the loss of hope leads a select few youngsters to a life of murder and mayhem. The movie, interestingly enough, begins with an error. Pictures of notorious criminals David Berkowitz, Ken Bianchi, and Ed Kemper float by in order to set a context for what we are about to see. Regrettably for the film, Berkowitz, Kemper, and Bianchi were serial killers. The two boys we meet in the movie, Roy and Bo, are spree killers. There is a big difference between the two as anyone interested in true crime stories knows.

Roy Alston (Maxwell Caulfield) and Bo Richards (Charlie Sheen) are just two of your average, everyday kids getting ready to graduate from high school. They are also the loner type, two kids who paired up with each other after the other kids excluded them from the various social circles. Both Roy and Bo are instantly recognizable high school types, at least for those of us perceptive enough to notice those around us during those painful years of compulsory schooling. They are a little rough around the edges, thanks to their miserable home lives and their relative poverty, but occasionally they make tentative overtures to others that are cruelly rebuffed. One can only feel sorry for Bo when he admires one of the prettiest girls in his class from afar, hoping against hope that he can somehow approach her and strike up a meaningful connection. Roy, the more cynical of the two, has long since reconciled himself to being an outcast, and he spends most of his time quashing any kernels of kindness popping up in Bo's mind. There's something more about Roy, something that goes beyond cynicism into the realms of downright cruelty and hatred. We first see it when he talks to a Marine recruiter on campus about joining the Corps so he can kill people. Not good. Later, of course, Roy will give full vent to his murderous rages.

After crashing a graduation party and finding themselves tossed out on the street, the two decide to cruise down to Los Angeles for a day or two for some old fashioned hijinks. Besides, getting away for a few days sounds like a good idea when the only thing they have to come back to is a couple of cruddy jobs at a local factory, jobs that will probably last a lifetime. The two barely enter the Los Angeles area when all heck breaks loose at a gas station. Roy, thinking the attendant ripped him off over two bucks in gas, beats the man to a bloody pulp. Later, at the beach, one of the boys throws a beer bottle that strikes an elderly woman on the head. Two young ladies attempt to confront the pair about the bottle, and one of them ends up taking a ride around the parking lot on the hood of Roy's car. More atrocities follow, all escalating with ferocious brutality. A gay man dies at their hands, as does an attractive young couple whose only crime involved first making eye contact with Bo and later spurning him in a video arcade. By the time Roy murders Angie (Patti D'Arbanville) while she's in the process of wooing Bo, the game is about over. Two cops, Detective Mark Woods (Christopher McDonald) and Detective Ed Hanley (Hank Garrett), have been tracking these two since the gas station heist, and a lucky break puts the boys right in their hands. Or does it?

I remember seeing "The Boys Next Door" back in the mid 1980s on cable. I was impressed with it then and consider it a good movie now. Aside from the misidentification of the two as serial killers, the movie still contains plenty of good performances, good dialogue, and shocking scenes. Sheen and Caulfield both carry off their respective roles convincingly, but Caulfield does the best job in the frightening role of Roy Alston. His speech about how he feels inside sends chills down the spine, as does his transformation from composed youth to shrieking beast. Oddly enough in a film larded with killings, I consider the bottle scene one of the most disturbing in the film. The look on that old lady's face when the bottle conks her on the head is so upsetting that it's not easy to forget, especially when the camera cuts back to Bo and Roy in order to show them laughing about what they did. There's just something about this scene that successfully telegraphs, just as much as the murders, the coldness of these two kids. "The Boys Next Door" does contain at least one unintentionally hilarious scene in the form of Detective Ed Hanley's haircut. Geez, I thought he was wearing a tricorn hat or something!

Extras on the DVD include a commentary with Spheeris and Caulfield, a trailer, and cast biographies. The picture quality looks great for a twenty year old film. I would recommend this movie to most fans of low budget cinema, but it's also got an appeal to Charlie Sheen completists (Is there such a thing? God help us!) and lovers of movies dealing with the criminal mindset.

Deeply disturbing story of 2 boys who have no sense of right and wrong. One boy has so much anger in him that he just wants to kill and Charlie Sheen's charcter doesn't seem to mind. You won't be turning this movie off. I seen it for the first time about 11 years ago. It was one of the best movies I had ever seen. I bought it on dvd the first day it came out. Just as good the second time around.

One of Charlie Sheen's least known movies, but a must for true fans of the actor. If I had to compare this movie with any other movie, I think it would be Falling Down. If you liked Falling Down, you'd probably like this movie as well. Like Falling Down, it contains a character who has, in an almost sane kind of way, gone off the deep end. As you're watching it, you tend to start to see things from Bo's (Sheen) perspective as things slowly, but steadily, get out of control. The movie also has a lot of politically incorrect scenes like Falling Down. If you're sensitive to this sort of thing, you'll probably hate this movie. If you're a fairly young (under 40) beer-guzzling guy looking for a fun movie to watch with the rest of the guys or you're a stereotypical jock in college, you'll probably love this movie and find some classic lines to repeat for years. Most women, however, will probably hate this movie or think that it's stupid.

The movie starts with a funny scene that I won't spoil for you, but the basic plot of the movie is that the two main characters are about to graduate from high school in a town and are destined to work in the local factory like their fathers and grandfathers. They decide to spend a weekend in the city to enjoy their last few moments of freedom (from school and work) by putting on some of their nicer clothes (see cover photo), eat someplace nice (The Sizzler), have some fun, and maybe go a little crazy. Things start getting out of hand during an altercation with a middle-eastern gas station attendant (Sheen's character refers to him as a "camel jockey") and get much worse from there.

Product was received quickly, and was just as described! Will buy from them again. My husband has wanted this movie for forever, and I was thrilled to find it here for a low low price.

I remember watching this as an angry teen in the late 80's. Something about the tone just fit perfectly with how I was feeling. This story of two outcasts who just throw their hands in the air, one with a touch of hope, the other completely jaded captures something that I've never really felt in another movie.

I've just rewatched this film on netflix for the first time in 20+ years and was shocked even more. As a teen the violence and attitude was just perfect. As an adult, it is disturbing and dark and funny and still... Connected with me on some level I thought was gone. Just a great piece of movie history. If my parents had wanted to know how I felt, I would have shown them this. No, I wouldn't have, but it would have been an honest response if I had.

Sometimes a film comes along, that will truly stick with you long after you've seen it. It will gnaw at your mind and make you look at life and people in a very different way, which you never did before. "The Boys Next Door" is just such a film for me.

Director Penelope Spheeris is probably most well-known for her work on perennial comedic fare, such as "Wayne's World" and "Black Sheep," but long before that she was a very edgy and somewhat visionary filmmaker. Some of her earliest works have a very deep social commentary to them, of which this film is one of her best (and most overlooked). This tale of two high school outcasts, who go to the big city and raise some murderous hell, almost has a modern ring to it. In the wake of real life events, like the massacres at Columbine and Virgina Tech, this film seems less the low-rent crime drama it probably was seen as when it first debuted and more like a prophecy of things to come.

It is absolutely chilling in how it shows the casual use of violence by two supposed teenagers. Their lack of conscience and concern for anything or anyone, save themselves, feels like a mirror being held up to our so-called modern world. What really stuck out for me, though, was the moments of seemingly uncontainable rage expressed by the character of Roy (incredibly performed by Maxwell Caulfield). One scene that truly made my blood run cold, was after his first act of violence on a gas-station attendant, when he and his friend Bo (played by a very young Charlie Sheen, in one of his earliest leading roles) are talking about it in their hotel room, and Roy expresses that the beating wasn't good enough. That he should have killed him. The look of satisfaction on his face as he expresses these thoughts, brought out a dark symmetry to the character, which would dominate everything he does afterwards. It actually comes off like a blueprint to the mindset of such thrill-killers that we see in our real world today. I really enjoyed how the film almost plays like a docudrama in some instances, like this one.

While some of the language and settings might be a bit dated, the emotion and societal insights into the mind of teenage rage are as powerful now as they ever were back in 1985 (when the film debuted). At the time, this film had a bit of controversy about it, due to the amounts of violence shown on screen, but I think that today, in our much more politically-correct minded world-view, it is the thoughts behind the violence which should be more disturbing. It is a film that has truly become MORE relevant as time has gone by, not less. If there is anything lacking in the film, it would be not enough information given on the characters life at home. We see the torment they have with not fitting in with their peers at school, as well as their fears of living out the rest of their lives at dead-end jobs, but there is little info on the role played by the family in helping these boys to be filled with such murderous contempt. There is one scene with Roy's father being shown as a neglectful parent, more interested in getting his next beer than the welfare of his son, but I felt this brief glimpse should have been expand on more. Still, even lacking in this one area, the film is still a very potent brew to behold.

Make no mistake, this is not a "feel good" or party film. It is a shocking, and sometimes twisted, look into how society can mold a teenager into a raging killer and how easily that rage can be let loose on an unprepared society. And the fact these two characters are attractive looking, as well, only deepens the scary similarities of our current times. Despite that, however, it is certainly a very worthwhile film and is deserving of much more attention. If you are looking for a film that isn't just out to entertain you, but also make you think, this is one movie you need to seek out! But be warned... prepare to be unnerved by much of what you will see. I doubt many will walk away from this film totally unaffected, nor should they.

This is one of those movies that for some reason is often overlooked by many viewers. True, it is a low-budget film starring two actors( Charlie Sheen, and Maxwell Caulfield) who haven't done anything remarkable in a about a decade, but it kept me on the edge of my seat all the way to the thrilling conclusion. Its cool to see the intense and belligerent performance by given by Maxwell Caulfield. I read a review on Amazon where someone compared this film to the movie Falling Down, I couldn;t agree more. The whole movie moves through a of a series of scenes consisting of everyday situations and shows how a psychotic and over the edge teen reacts to them, its not good. Charlie Sheen plays his timid sidekick more deteremined to winning his psychotic friend's affection rather than speaking up for himself and saying what they are doing is wrong. All and all a great movie and highley entertaining.

I have to say a mad movie especially whenthey beat up the petrol attendent with a petrol hose

I liked this movie. It had an exellent plot and scenery. Boys Next Door shows how a teenager might act to his/her anger. This movie is the best movie I ever saw. Boys Next Door has action and drama. This movie is a must see. I don't think you will ever see a movie as good as this agian.