Freaking out at the frat house
Film review: Bad Neighbours (15)
Running time 96 minutes
Rating: **
THE words ‘fraternity house’ in the description of a film’s plot is normally a dead giveaway for the presence of drink, sex, and suchlike, but little could prepare you for the level of physical abuse of all kinds in Bad Neighbours. As many in this country are unlikely to know a great deal about the activities of fraternities, apart from vague notions of teenage excess, it’s probably helpful to give a little background. Think of a group of people, often without clothes, all engaging in drinking and sex contests of gargantuan proportions, accompanied by high volume music of the Death Metal kind. And this is when they’re revising for exams. So imagine how you would feel as a newly-married couple, with a new-born baby, moving into a nice neighbourhood, having spent all your money on the bricks and mortar, and then finding that Fraternity Delta Psi is just moving in next door. Do you launch a pre-emptive strike, warning of plague, avenging angels, or even community police officers, or do you batten down the hatches and say cheerfully to yourself that no teenager could party for THAT long and hope for the best? Option one makes you look, well, old, and the second is frankly silly. However long you think a teenager can party, double it and realise they have only got to the being sick in shoes contest. Such is the scenario facing Mac (Seth Rogan), Kelly (Rose Byrne) and daughter Stella. In the frat house are frat leaders Teddy (Zac Efron) and Pete (Dave Franco). For the next 95 minutes we are offered a diet of pratical jokes of the Jackass variety, revenge tricks that even the worst of us would find excessive, and language that features every swear word you have ever heard – and I do mean EVERY. After a while, all the swearing just becomes background noise which enables you to concentrate on the plot and character portrayal, directed by Nicholas Stoller (Get Him to the Greek). Yup, done that, so what about 1,001 uses for a car airbag (apart from being in a car and preventing injury in a crash that is)? It’s difficult to engage with any film when you don’t share much of the cultural background that is the heart of the movie, but I tried by moving the frat house to the outskirts of Norwich and thinking of some of the gargantuan parties held in a very nice Victorian manor back in the 1960s. But even there, the being sick in a shoe contest didn’t feature until day three when the then Norwich Constabulary were barred from taking part on the basis of large feet. So, I see where the film is coming from in the line of gross-out teen adventure films. It’s all good dirty fun, if you ignore the language, the pain and the child-like plot and I think you get a clue as to the standard of acting when I say that baby Stella is by far the stand-out performer.
