BY LEE PFEIFFER
Mill Creek Entertainment has released the 1981 comedy "Neighbors" on Blu-ray. The film boasted an impressive line-up of talent both before and behind the cameras. Stars John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd were both riding high on the previous year's success of "The Blues Brothers". Director John G. Avildsen had won the Oscar a few years before for "Rocky". The producers were Richard Zanuck and David Brown, the team behind the blockbusters "The Sting" and "Jaws" and the screenplay was written by the esteemed Larry Gelbart, based on Thomas Berger's recently published novel. The story finds Belushi as Earl Keese, a bored executive living a hum-drum life with his equally bored wife Enid (Kathryn Walker). The Keeses reside on a seemingly isolated suburban street (the film was shot in Staten Island) and the bland surroundings reflect the bland state of their marriage. Then one night Earl notices that a couple is moving into the vacant house next door. They are Vic (Dan Aykroyd) and Ramona (Cathy Moriarty) and the fact that they are choosing to move in during the night is only the first sign of their bizarre lifestyle and behavior. When Earl makes they acquaintance, he is immediately unnerved. Vic is the polar opposite of Earl's button-down, conservative manner and Ramona is a sex-obsessed beauty who has no qualms about trying to seduce Earl, going so far as to sneak under his bed sheets while Edna is preparing dinner for the group. Vic is perpetually upbeat and smiling, though he and Ramona engage in a series of cruel pranks and jokes with Earl as their target. Edna is immediately smitten with the new couple, however, and finds their over-the-top behavior and bad habits to be an anecdote to her dull life with Earl. As the plot progresses, Earl and Vic alternate between being friendly and adversarial, each competing to one-up each other through elaborate pranks most of which find Earl on the losing end. When Earl and Enid's wayward daughter Elaine (Lauren Marie-Taylor) arrives home from college, cheerfully explaining that she has been expelled, she, too, is intoxicated by Vic and Ramona's exotic and unpredictable, sexually-driven behavior.
Bizarrely, "Neighbors" seems to have been inspired in part by Edward Albee's masterpiece "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" In that classic, a young, bored couple are induced to visit another couple, George and Martha, who they have just met. As the seemingly endless evening unwinds, they witness their new friends engage in outrageous and often vulgar behavior and language. They find themselves alternately repulsed and excited by George and Martha's outrageous antics right up until everyone ends up suffering brutal psychological assaults on their relationships and psyches. "Neighbors" takes a similar premise and adds slapstick humor. Belushi and Aykroyd were to have played opposite roles but Belushi wanted to prove he could play the straight man in a comedy. Both acquit themselves well, as do Moriarty and Walker- but the film itself is an unsatisfying mess. Behind the scenes, Belushi, who was trying valiantly to conquer his drug addiction, fell back into bad habits. He squabbled with Larry Gelbert over the script and hated working with director Avildsen. At one point, Belushi tried to get John Landis to take over direction of the film. No one could even agree on the musical score and Avildsen dismissed the original composer, Tom Scott, in favor of his frequent collaborator, Bill Conti, who provides a score that is supremely annoying and distracting. After test screenings showed audiences were confused and unsatisfied with the film, reshoots took place to try to salvage it. "Neighbors" was heavily marketed and ended up making money, though falling short of expectations due to bad word-of-mouth. (It was released directly to video in the UK.) There are some occasionally amusing moments but the disjointed script never quite gels and the characters are more irritating than funny.
The Mill Creek Blu-ray has a very fine transfer and is creatively packaged to replicate the movie's original VHS release. Unfortunately, the perks stop there as there are no other bonus features. This is a pity since film historians would have a field day recounting the dramatic developments in the making of the movie, which proved to be John Belushi's final feature film. He would die of a drug overdose four months after its release. He was said to loathe the final cut, making the tragic circumstances associated with "Neighbors" even more profound.
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