From Barton Fink to Adaptation, the creatively blocked Los Angeles lifer is part of the city’s mythology – and this amusing splatterhouse horror-comedy is a nice addition to that canon. Orbiting around dilly-dallying and passive-aggressive prog-rocker William Brown (Jonah Ray Rodrigues), this film makes homicidal psychosis look like a blast. And it also gives Alex Winter his best acting role since Bill & Ted (also part of the blocked-LA-artist genre, come to think of it) yucking it up as a severed head.
William is hamster-wheeling his way to nowhere in his sound-engineer day job, while eternally finishing off a prog meisterwerk in his home studio. His lovely girlfriend Emily (Kiran Deol) puts up with his quirks, which include a pathological inability to confront their new neighbour Vlad (Winter) about the non-stop partying next door that is further impeding his progress. So when he finally does the dreaded door knock and is drawn into an impromptu wrestling bout with the incorrigible Slav, it’s safe to say that accidentally impaling his neighbour on an exposed barbell wasn’t part of the plan.
It’s not the last time this “serial manslaughterer” strikes. Like the hapless hitman skit from Mulholland Drive, Brown keeps racking up the accidental deaths, egged on by Winter’s decapitated bonce. Director Josh Forbes flirts with the idea he might actually be delusional, but milks the discomfort of the viscera-splattered David Byrne-esque straight man with loving detail. The faux-80s YouTube videos from the bass player of prog legends Dawn Dimension are great, doubling up as corpse-disposal tutorials: “So you fucked up and killed somebody! Relax. When the band goes on tour, it’s gonna happen.”
The prosthetics are equally relishsome: Forbes must have made an SFX artist very happy the day he placed an order for a human face smushed by a van’s tyre tread. Even so, at 85 minutes, Destroy All Neighbors gets a little indulgent, and the plot, as William finds his creative mojo in the company of his newly acquired ghoulish ensemble, is throwaway. But it’s a gleeful lo-fi rampage all the same.
• Destroy All Neighbors is available on Shudder from 12 January.
