The Neighbors

Funny, well written and full of classic wiseau moments.

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.

Let's start off frank and honest, because I don't want my excellent score of 10 out of 10 to be misleading for the casual IMDb reader. This is most certainly not a perfect 10 when it comes to quality. In fact, quite the opposite. This is an incompetent, inept, amateurish mess, boasting a completely lack of focus and talent in front of and behind the camera. A cheap, no-budget train-wreck of proportions best described as epic in scope, dragged down virtually every minute but a laundry-list of faults, including...

-Story lines that are nonsensical and lack any form or structure. A- plots often go without proper establishment and are hastily brought up and sort-of "resolved" during the final moments of an episode. Sub- plots are casually introduced without any set-up and then hastily dropped without resolution.

-Characters are paper-thin clichéd archetypes we've seen before. Characters personify negative racial or gender stereotypes that are meant to be "idenfiable", but come off as mean-spirited parodies of themselves.

-Production values are on the same level as a first-year film student's, with cheap image quality and jarring camera-work, combined with terrible audio-mixing and boring stock-music that is replayed over and over again.

-The so-called acting is laughable and atrocious. Performers akin to cardboard cut-outs who punctuate their dialog with seemingly random emphasis and screaming for their big "dramatic lines."

-Abysmal editing with no regard for flow or continuity, leading to blatant errors including characters and objects frequently disappearing or moving large distances between shots, or angle-changes so drastic they give the viewing a sense of stylistic whiplash.

-And it's impossible to tell if the show is honestly "that bad" on its own, or merely absurd self-parody that attempts to come off as "that bad." It's just so terrible, you can't help but think they're trying purpose to be terrible... yet you have the lingering feeling that this might be an honest effort that is simply crumbling apart due to a lack of thought and reason behind-the-scenes.

So why am I giving it a perfect 10?

Entertainment value, entertainment value, entertainment value!

You see, this series is the newest work from the almost mythological figure in film known as Tommy Wiseau- a strange being who clearly loves life, loves cinema and loves entertainment, yet can't wrap his mind around how to create quality work himself.

He is of course best known for his cinematic blunder/achievement "The Room"- an independent drama film that became notorious for it's nonsensical script, bizarre sense of direction and so-bad-it's-good style. And it has gone on to become a celebrated cult phenomenon- a sort-of modern-day "Rocky Horror Picture Show" with fans around the world who gather for screenings and eat up every scene in all its furiously confusing glory.

And this very much does feel like a "Tommy Wiseau Production" worthy of the same cult-status as that glorious film. "The Neighbors" is essentially on the same sort-of storytelling plane as "The Room", merely lacking the surprisingly high production-value and experience crew of that film, instead being traded in for a shoestring budget. Which frankly, makes it all the more entertaining.

This is one of those "perfect storms" of awfulness. In its handful of episodes, it provides enough comedic fodder and hilarious (and unintentional) laughs to be an ideal viewing choices for groups of friends who want to sit back and behold a spectacle of badness.

It has become our new go-to for movie-nights, and we have already watched the series (thus far) several times, each time enjoying it more and more.

For "so bad, it's good" entertainment value, this easily earns a perfect 10, and is well-worth checking out for fans of such films and series. Particularly those already familiar with Wiseu's "The Room."

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".

Let's be honest: nobody comes to "The Neighbors" as a Tommy Wiseau virgin. People come to "The Neighbors" because they have seen "The Room," and, because they feel an innate need to be punished and can't afford to have a really attractive person do it for them, they want more.

Well, it has everything you would want. Tommy Wiseau plays several characters- badly. Especially off-putting is his attempt to play an "all-American boy" about 1/3 his real age. The other performances vary from incompetent, to lazy, to "just mailing it in," although an all-time list of best acting talent ever couldn't make anything out of the writing.

And what the Hell is going on with those bizarre bumpers between scenes? Also: every single scene feels like one of the "acting" scenes in a porn film. It takes rare anti-talent to do that. Contributing to that vibe is the single-camera shots with no POV cuts, combined with sets that scream "dollar store." Or the number of times that the scenes really do involve sleazy attempts by one character to get it on with another, but done in such a robotic way as to be off-putting. Or the pizza delivery guy who takes his shirt off for no apparent reason.

Okay, here's the game for viewing "The Neighbors": load up every bad porn film plot trope on "bingo" cards, and hand them out before watching three episodes. Wiseau uses them all! Oh, and people yell a lot.

See it with your friends that you took to see "The Room," and were still your friends after the experience.