The Big Picture

Destroy All Neighbors is a horror-comedy that takes the terrible neighbors trope to an extreme level. The film is filled with gross-out horror, dirty jokes, and disgusting VFX gags. While talented actor Alex Winter steals the show as the villainous Vlad, the film lacks cohesive storytelling and direction.

Whether you’re sharing a wall with someone who loves death metal or can’t get the old man next door to stop chucking his lawn clippings into your yard, neighbors can really be killers. They’re a vital part of the fragile ecosystem we call community, but nobody ever thinks they’ll actually do anything about the terrible one, beyond maybe bang on a shared wall and hope your earplugs you ordered come just that much faster. Well, nobody except Jonah Ray Rodrigues, the lead of Shudder’s newest horror-comedy, Destroy All Neighbors. He takes the terrible neighbors trope to an all-new level when his aspiring prog rock musician William finds himself with a new neighbor (Alex Winter) who drives him up the wall.

When indirect confrontation doesn’t work, William decides to take matters into his own hands — an endeavor that ends with a dead body that won’t stay dead. When Winter’s Vlad starts to plague him no matter what he does, William finds himself on a gory, slapstick adventure, trailing death and destruction until he’s piled up such a body count that he may well count as a new slasher for the horror history books — unless he can get his album finished in time.

Destroy All Neighbors Struggling prog-rock musician William Brown finds himself in a living nightmare when he accidentally kills Vlad, the neighbor from hell. Release Date January 12, 2024 Director Josh Forbes Runtime 85 minutes Writers Mike Benner , Jared Logan , Charles A. Pieper

‘Destroy All Neighbors’ Goes All Out on the Gore

If you’re not a fan of gross-out horror, there’s nothing in this for you. The film, from a script by Charles Pieper and Jared Logan, has less of a plot and more a framework meant to pile dirty jokes and disgusting VFX gags onto, rather than anything substantial or truly interesting. It’s propelled mostly by Rodrigues, who, while a good actor, is playing a character so borderline loathsome that it only serves to make the film’s jokes worse, whether it’s the fake vomit and entrails or seeing how many times they can fit the word “fuck” into a single minute of screentime. (Malcolm Tucker, eat your heart out.) Beyond being so clueless and sorry for himself that he manages to kill people, William doesn’t have much of an arc at all as his story is about as complicated and messy as even the best of prog rock songs — and there aren’t too many of those.

It’s hard, then, to root for a character so self-involved that you wonder why he’s the hero in the first place. He loses his job, then his girlfriend, all by being so absorbed in attempting to make a great prog album despite the world having moved on from the genre likely before he was born. It smacks of all the men on the Internet whining about how music used to be better back in their day, with no emotional core beyond his addiction to finishing his album. Granted, most horror characters don’t need to have a fascinating inner life to be worth watching, but those characters don’t usually end up being the killers themselves. And even then, Michael Myers has more of an interior life than William, who probably gets plagued by uncertainty and self-pity when his girlfriend insists he step away from the mixing board and go get the groceries for once in his life.

Alex Winter Steals the Show as the Villainous Vlad
Image via Shudder

Winter, however, gets to have the time of his life as the awful Vlad. While he does nothing beyond taunt William and get him into further trouble with the law, his take on the disgusting neighbor provides an opportunity to chew every bit of scenery he can find, and he does so with relish. Borrowing from his time making Freaked — another film where he got buried under piles of prosthetic makeup — he turns everything up to eleven (his speakers included) and makes the film his by a mile. He’s clearly the centerpiece of the whole goopy thing, even if he’s not the main character. It’s been a while since we’ve seen him in front of the camera, with his efforts more focused on directing projects like The YouTube Effect and Zappa, and it’s a welcome return to see him back, especially digging into something as weird and meaty as this.

Similarly, while the film lacks good screenwriting, it makes up for it in its production, a heavily stylized, off-the-wall piece of art that feels like a psychedelic trip, if nothing else. The prosthetics heaped upon Winter (or, at least, his head) are insanely impressive, as well as those plastered onto William’s other victims. The former is completely unrecognizable as the sleazy, overweight monster, and with the voice he creates, I’d have a hard time believing he’s even in the film at all, if not for his cameo as William’s ineffective lawyer. It’s Bill and Ted by way of Tom Savini, colorful and chaotic and impressively designed, prog rock soundtrack and all.

‘Destroy All Neighbors’ Ultimately Lacks Direction
Image via Shudder

But while the individual pieces are impressive achievements on their own, nothing ever seems to quite gel — or congeal, much like all the blood William spills throughout the film. A lack of cohesive storytelling (or even just storytelling that takes itself seriously for half a second) leaves Destroy All Neighbors feeling frayed and annoying, the entire thing carried on the back of a man-child who thinks he can outdo King Crimson with GarageBand and the power of extremely misguided belief.

It’s fairly standard fare for Shudder, one more of the kinda-decent, kinda-crap offerings that populate their streamer amongst better titles like Brooklyn 45 or Night of the Living Dead, but it leaves me disappointed, with so much left on the table that could’ve made it better. Its commitment to satire feels halfhearted, with jokes and VFX gags meant to cover up the glaring holes in its commentary on…something. What that is, I don’t know, since they seem to want us to sympathize with a character driving around with a severed head in his passenger seat, despite every attempt to show him as immature and unreasonable. Without Winter in the frame, it lacks direction and oomph, leading the Lost Boys star to carry everything on his foam latex-covered shoulders.

Destroy All Neighbors REVIEWDestroy All Neighbors is a chaotic horror romp with a strong central perfromance and interesting production design though not much else. ProsAlex Winter’s performance as the neighbor is entertaining to watch every time he is in the frame The production design feels like a drug trip while remaining beautiful to look at ConsThere is little substance to this gory horror ride and it ultimately offers too little outside of that The central character who essentially becomes his own slasher villain is not memorable or interesting enough to carry the film

Destroy All Neighbors is available to stream on Shudder in the U.S. starting January 12.

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