Josh Forbes’ stylised black comedy Destroy All Neighbors begins as an apartment-house nightmare with queasy emphasis on decades-old décor, jury-rigged and outdated wiring, antisocial folk playing (and composing) loud music behind paper-thin walls, and a constant need for put-upon schlub William (Jonah Ray) to stop whatever he’s doing to deal with some fresh crisis. His work life is little better, with a homeless man (Christian Calloway) outside the studio haranguing him for not providing croissants every day and a simpering boss (Thomas Lennon) who defers every decision to a drug-addled rock god and still demands long, unrewarding hours of work. The only plus in William’s life is lawyer girlfriend Emily (Kiran Deol), and she’s fed up with his whining over escalating minor nuisances while forgetting to do chores for her.
Alex Winter, unrecognisable under gnome/troll make-up, is a hoot as the odious Vlad.
After a reel or so of merely uncomfortable everyday life, Destroy All Neighbors shows its true colours with a gruesome, hilarious death sequence which kicks off William’s career as a ‘serial manslaughterer’ and finds him in continued argument with the walking corpses (or crawling partial corpses) of folk he didn’t mean to kill. The film can’t quite decide whether its living dead are all in William’s mind or actual resurrectees co-opted as session musicians in a final, desperate attempt to get his hugely unfashionable album finished. Most muso horror movies take obvious jabs at heavy metal, but this gets points for poking fun at prog while appreciating its labyrinthine strangeness.
Alex Winter, unrecognisable under gnome/troll make-up, is a hoot as the odious Vlad, but there are also funny bits from Randee Heller as a laid-back elderly groupie-turned-blackened walking skeleton and guest star Kumail Nanjiani as an officious gate-guard turning a vanload of corpses away from a handy metal smelting plant. Gabe Bartalos, a mainstay since the Basket Case films, provides surreal old-fashioned practical gore effects.