Stoller: Neighbors (2014)

In many ways, Neighbors feels like a companion piece to This Is 40, or another sequel to Knocked Up. Once again, we’re presented with a couple of bromance regulars in suburban mode – Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne play a couple who’ve just had their first baby and bought their first home, only to discover that a frathouse has moved in next door, led by Zac Efron. Although Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s script might seem to draw on the tradition of Animal House or, more recently, Old School, it’s not really played for laughs – instead, the comedy tends to feel more like a way of concealing or cushioning a stark renewal of the vigilante films of the 1970s and early 1980s. Those films often had explicitly racist or sexist agendas which are no longer tenable, even as camp, so Neighbors  redirects all its exploitative energy at young people – it is as terrified of youth culture as, say, the Deathwish cycle was terrified of African-American culture. That works perfectly with Efron, who’s presented as a frank invitation to paranoia, a vision of unimaginable futurity – you can almost see him graduating from Zefron to Zac Efron over the course of the film, slotting into the niche that Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg have carved out over the last decade. Suddenly old enough to realise how much of an asset his youth really is, he flaunts himself with lavish abandon, gyrating through one moral panic montage sequence after another, until it’s like watching an alternative version of This Is The End in which Seth Rogen wasn’t invited to James Franco’s house party, especially since Dave Franco makes an appearance as Efron’s sidekick. And that apocalyptic mentality brings a strangely old-fashioned analog suburbia back into existence, bypassing social and digital media to crouch, paranoid, at the cusp of windows, doors and other fixtures, voyeuristic in a creaky, almost comforting way. Almost, but not entirely, since it’s still driven by brutal, bromantic rage, the siege mentality of an entire genre bunkering down and taking up arms against a new generation.