Customer Reviews

Next Door [VHS]

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

 

 

This is one of those weird films that is funny in a way you don't expect. My wife and I first rented this show in about '96 and often talked about it later. It's one of those shows that just sticks in your head. I finally bought a used VHS copy because it doesn't appear to be on DVD. Of course, I thought "Falling Down" was a feel good movie.

These people below obiously dont get comedy. This movie is great, james wood gives a great performance, and randy quaid is perfect. Everyone has had a neighbor that makes you look out the window to make sure they arnt out there before you take the trash out. This is a classic and deffinatly worth seeing.

Was this movie really supposed to be a comedy, or did some poor shmuck of a video cover assembler misplace the text? About as funny as a doorstop. Depressing.

Director Tony Bill's attempt at this Showtime TVM black comedy is undone by a more cruel than funny teleplay by Barney Cohen, which take it's cue from Dennis Quaid as a butcher with a grudge against his next door neighbour college professor James Woods. The grudge is based on the fact that Quaid hit his own college professor for marking him an average score and thereby, in his eyes, forcing Quaid to lead a working class life. This kind of short sighted thinking is about as ludicrious as the idea of Quaid using Woods for payback, beginning with a garden sprinkler running over Woods' lawn. Quaid being physically larger than Woods leads to the inevitable physical confrontation, and Bill wants us to find humour in Quaid's demonstration of a survival of the fittest mentality, where men's worth is determined by brute force, but Bill's touch is more comic grotesque, underlined by the cartoon music score of Van Dyke Parks. Wood's man of reason and intellect is typically portayed in a weaker light, though it's odd to see Woods being so passive when he normally has an edge. When Quaid focuses his quest on Wood's wife, Kate Capshaw, we enter Straw Dogs territory. The question of whether it is better to be friends with the people who we are forced to live beside, or better to ignore them is never stretched beyond a juvenile level, where the police are no longer able to protect us. About the only noteworthy touch is Bill's editing slides. Considering the material, Woods and Capshaw have moments of sane humour, though Quaid, revisiting his Parents role in the love of meat, loses the battle of empathy.