Critical and Box Office Response
For one test-version of the film, the head of Columbia Pictures, Frank Price, made the contentious decision to have quotations from positive press reviews of Berger's book assembled into a caption that would serve as a prologue to the film (this move prompted an angry missive from Dan Aykroyd). The final version of Neighbors was released to cinemas in December 1981. Although Neighbors was not a commercial flop, it received harsh reaction from both critics and from some fans of Belushi and Aykroyd, who were perhaps expecting a comedy closer to The Blues Brothers. It still received a fresh rating of 67% on Rotten Tomatoes.
David Ansen, writing for Newsweek Magazine, wrote:
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Thomas Berger's paranoid comic novel could have been made a fascinating movie in the hands of, say, Roman Polanski, who knows how to make a comedy of menace. John G. Avildsen (Rocky) doesn't have a clue: you can't twist reality if you can't establish a reality to twist. Belushi and Aykroyd obviously got cast because they're "bankable," but no one seems to have asked if they were appropriate. The parts demand subtle comic acting – they do TV turns. Just how much blame falls on Larry Gelbart's disjointed script is hard to say (Avildsen could make any writer look bad), but without question Bill Conti has come up with the year's most offensive score – a cattle prod of cartoonish cuteness that only underlines the movie's desperate uncertainty of tone. The ads for Neighbors call it "a comic nightmare;" it's more like a sour case of creative indigestion. |
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On the other hand, Roger Ebert, reviewing for the Chicago Sun-Times, awarded the film three stars out of four, and wrote that "Neighbors is a truly interesting comedy, an offbeat experiment in hallucinatory black humor. It grows on you." Ebert also wrote approvingly of Belushi and Aykroyd as the leads, citing it as "brilliant casting, especially since they divided the roles somewhat against our expectations." In his book Guide for the Film Fanatic, Danny Peary wrote, "I think this surreal comedy is imaginatively done, and perfectly conveys the lunacy of the two comics...I'm glad they went against type because both actors are at their absolute best." Peary argued that the "final picture is faithful to Thomas Berger's zany, satirical novel" but noted that he prefers "the film's happier ending."
Neighbors was John Belushi's last film; he died in March 1982, less than four months after the film's release. It was during filming this movie that he relapsed into drug addiction. A comprehensive look at the film's troubled production can be found in Bob Woodward's 1984 book, Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi and also in the 2005 book, Belushi: A Biography.
Read more about this topic: Neighbors (film)
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