Director – Josh Forbes, Screenplay – Jared Logan & Charles Pieper, Story – Mike Benner & Charles Pieper, Producers – Jonah Ray Rodrigues, Russell Sanzgiri & Alex Winter, Photography – Will Stone, Music – Ryan Kattner & Brett Morris, Visual Effects Supervisor – Casey Price, Visual Effects – Nove9 & Transformer, Title Animation – Rich Zim, Makeup Effects – Atlantic West Effects (Supervisor – Gabe Bartalos), Production Design – Kati Simon. Production Company – Counter Part Pictures.
Cast
Jonah Ray Rodrigues (William Brown), Alex Winter (Vlad/Public Defender), Kiran Deol (Emily Brown), Randee Heller (Eleanor), Christian Calloway (Auggie), DeMorge Brown (Phillip), Thomas Lennon (Scott), Ryan Kattner (Caleb Bang Jansen), Jon Daly (August ‘Swig’ Anderson), Madara Jayasena (Officer Ponds), Franco Vega (Officer McCormick), Kumail Nanjiani (Smelting Refinery Guard), Phil Hendrie (Police Captain Entenille)
Plot
William Brown is a sound engineer for a small music studio in Los Angeles. He is a devotee of prog rock and has been trying to perfect his own prog rock album. He is driven crazy in his endeavours to work on his album by Vlad, the new neighbour at his apartment building, who makes much noise and keeps playing loud music at all hours. In going to confront Vlad to ask him to turn it down, William accidentally kills him. Just as he goes to dispose of the body, William finds that Vlad will not stay dead, even after his body has been severed in pieces. Forced to kill others, who equally refuse to remain dead, William then sets out to employ the dead as the band he needs to complete his album.
Destroy All Neighbors was the second film for Josh Forbes, a music video director who previously made Contracted Phase II (2015). The film also comes produced by Alex Winter, alias Bill of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) fame, who has become a reasonable director in his own right – most notedly with the nutzoid Freaked (1993). In the film, Winter also plays the undead next-door-neighbour under makeup and appears more recognisably himself as Jonah Ray Rodrigues’s attorney.
Destroy All Neighbors comes in a Horror Comedy vein. Maybe the nearest point of comparison I could make is to a conte cruel comedy like A Fantastic Fear of Everything (2012), albeit with the addition of not exactly zombies but people who refuses to stay dead. (No explanation is ever given as to why this happens to people around Jonah Ray Rodrigues as opposed to any other dead). The film compounds the problems that Jonah Ray Rodrigues faces with blackly funny regard with new dead bodies being created just about every time something happens.
Alex Winter as Vlad
The film also shares the same problem that A Fantastic Fear of Everything had in that it takes an overly broad comic tone. This is particularly the case when it comes to almost any of the scenes involving Alex Winter as the neighbour Vlad. In the role, Winter is rafter-swingingly boisterous and plays for the gallery all he can, while maintaining an outrageous accent of unidentified East European origin. The scene with the Winter and Rodrigues arguing gets so over-the-top as to be silly, although the film gains some bizarre amusement subsequently when Winter refuses to stay dead and the situation keeps getting compounded as Rodrigues tries to dispose of the body and go on to record his album.
Destroy All Neighbors is an odd mix that swings between this broad farce and moments of quite black, deadpan humour in an oddly cheerful style. It doesn’t always successfully hit the note. If nothing else, it is the only film that comes with an enormous enthusiasm for the joys and artistic merits of prog rock.
