The Neighbors

With "The Neighbors" you get exactly what you're expecting from a Tommy Wiseau project: terrible acting and dialog, completely nonsensical interactions, bad direction, lighting and staging... the whole nine yards.

Unfortunately you also get characters that seem like walking talking racial and gender stereotypes straight out of 1996. In particular the black characters almost seem to exist to be offensive. If this is Tommy's idea of what black people are like inside his warped mind, he's not the harmless buffoon everyone seems to think they love.

Women are inexplicably running around in micro bikinis, women call each other dirty hos and sluts for no reason... the entire thing would be more offensive if it wasn't so incompetent.

Do yourself a favor and avoid this crap and just go watch "The Room" again.

A fever dream inside the mind of an emotionally unstable rodeo clown addicted to huffing gas, this show has it all. Chickens, princesses, bikinis, basketballs, fantasies about neighbors, inappropriately holding shotguns, and high strung stoner, this show will not disappoint. The only show to make Friends look believable.

There's a way to a make a bad movie and make it enjoyable in a "so bad it's good" kind of way. And that's to hire incompetent people for everything and then have the bad actors give it their all. It's been done so often most notably with Tommy Wiseau's first movie, "The Room". It's been called the "Citizen Kane" of bad movies and that's a title that genuinely fits. Everything about that movie is wrong but out of it grew this incredible movie that really needs to be seen to be believed. Tommy intended this to be a serious drama but because he heard people were laughing at all the serious moments, he decided to change his tune and say it was always intended as a black comedy. He even wrote that as the tagline for it.

But this comes with a problem. People expected badness from Tommy so that's what he gave them but you can't do the same thing on purpose. It has the stink of artifice on it. What was charming in the first movie becomes painfully obvious in everything he does afterwards. Look at the original "Birdemic". Then look at the sequel. The actors are in on the joke and it shows. What made the original so great is the bad everything. What made the second so bad is they tried to imitate the first one. And that's where we are with "The Neighbors".

The actors, including Tommy, are intentionally giving a bad performance. They're overacting because that worked in "The Room". But now you see them deliberately trying to do poorly. It's no longer "so bad it's good". It's "so bad because it's bad".

After watching this I managed to recover from the sofa and realise that I'm not doing that bad in life if stuff like this is managing to pass through production companies and make it on streaming sites let alone the internet itself. I saw the earlier trailers of this show and it was way better than what they made here. I dunno if it is intentionally bad but it's truly a marvel. Everything is a disaster, acting, blocking, camera operating and exposure, sound editing and recording, colour grading and lighting, I think I could go on with this list to carry on explaining what is so wrong. I like to imagine that this is a satire of porn acting but done on an actual multi-episode release. It's truly memorable and a must watch for any filmmaker to criticise rather than enjoy.

To be fair, it made me and my girlfriend continuously laugh. Watch it and take it in!

Funny, well written and full of classic wiseau moments.