Neighbors is one of those movies that you either love or hate. This reviewer didn’t exactly hate it, but is not a big fan of what Leonard Maltin calls “the new vulgarity.”

Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne play a couple with a young baby still adapting to parenthood. They live in a nice suburban neighbourhood, but all of a sudden a frat house moves in next door. As they fear, things get noisy. At first they try to be friends, making up to a very buff Zac Efron, the fraternity leader. But soon they are calling the cops because of the noise and the battle is on.

Now little of this is believable and it’s not meant to be. The whole idea is to be funny, and sometimes it is, but also to be gross too. So there are the usual penis jokes and wild, drunken parties, sort of Animal House updated.

Good taste goes out the window. I’m not sure that a nursing mother, unwilling to nurse her baby because of heavy boozing the night before, in pain with engorged breasts, is all that amusing, but the movie thinks it is. And so did many in the audience. But some of us did not.

Byrne is probably the best thing in the cast. Rogen, a coproducer as well as playing a leading role, is his usual buffoon self. It’s crude, rude and lewd, with lots of sex and nudity, so not surprsingly, a blockbuster at the box office.

Rating: two deer out of five

New on Video

Joaquin Phoenix turns in a compelling perfomance in the not-for-all tastes, Her.

Alf Cryderman is a Red Deer freelance writer and old movie buff.