1981’s ‘Neighbors’ is John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd’s Tragically Underappreciated Anarchist Comedy
books Cathy Moriarty comedies Dan Aykroyd Drugs john avildsen john belushi
John Serba
Everybody but Aykroyd and Belushi hated the idea of them playing against type.
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“Welcome to the end of the road, I guess.” What a line. A funny, loaded, bittersweet line, delivered by John Belushi in his final movie role. Welcome to the end of the road – and you need to pause briefly here – I guess. He says it to Dan Aykroyd in Neighbors. Aykroyd, Belushi’s closest friend, his SNL and Blues Brothers compatriot. In Neighbors, as auspicious an unwitting goodbye as last movies from deeply beloved, soon-to-be sadly deceased movie stars get.

But we’re not here to be sad again about Belushi and all the ways he could’ve made us laugh had he not died of a drug overdose at 33. No, we’re here to celebrate a movie that’s a redheaded stepchild of redheaded stepchildren. A movie that was a shitshow of a shoot and a brief blip on the Christmas, 1981 release schedule before it was quickly forgotten. A movie that was too weird for mainstream consumption and became barely a sub-footnote for the careers of everyone involved.

It’s also a movie that’s a masterpiece of offbeat comedy. And anyone who disagrees hasn’t heard my pitch, or bothered to take the time to consider, or reconsider, it.

I first went into Neighbors a blank slate, on a recommendation from a friend who is dearly beloved for many reasons — and this recommendation has become one of them. The film opens with a goofy, almost intrusive musical score that’s all theremins and plucky melodies and warped riffs on “Home! Sweet Home!,” like someone remixed a Looney Tunes soundtrack and slapped it on there. Belushi’s Earl Keene comes home from work and he and his wife Enid (Kathryn Walker) deposit themselves in front of the TV to drink wine and watch horribly depressing news reports. They’re drably contemplating dinner when they see an El Camino towing a UHaul trailer pull up to the house next door. Must be the new neighbors. How nice.

Earl first meets the missus next door, Cathy Moriarty’s Ramona, when she knocks on the door and pretty much stands there waiting for him to achieve an erection. He fumbles and sputters as her dress clings tightly and she speaks in a husky purr. Not too soon after, she’ll appear – maybe “manifest” is the right word, considering how suddenly it happens – upstairs in Earl’s bed, having disrobed and helped herself to a bath and positioned herself there with one arched eyebrow, without Enid knowing (or, possibly, caring), prompting Belushi to wiggle and stammer like someone funneled steam into his jockey shorts.

Next, Earl will meet Mr. Ramona, Vic, played by Aykroyd with a blonde dye job, piercing blue eyes, an interest in the Nazi tome on Earl’s bookshelf, a large wooden model of himself flying a Triebflübeljäger and speaking German to his German Shepherd. Vic is a nut. Weird in a sinister way. A loose goon. He suggests they eat dinner together, because like Earl, he’s had a long day and has an empty stomach. “I’m so hungry I could eat a baby’s butt through a park bench,” Vic quips, one of many off-kilter, off-color lines in this script. And they all hit like rabbit punches.

At this point, the realization sets in: Aykroyd and Belushi are playing against type. They’ve flip-flopped the wacko and straight-man roles. Earl is the milquest of toasts and Vic is the unpredictable maniac. One man’s tidy, dead-eyed, mundane suburban existence, in the space of about 24 hours, is about to be upended by a toxic tornado spun up by a (probably fascist) kook, and his seductress wife, and also possibly Earl’s wife, because her odd-duck behavior has us wondering if she isn’t in on it too, “it” being a bizarre conspiracy to render Earl totally f—ing insane.

That’s just a theory, though. It seems as if Neighbors had no set goal in mind when it was made, beyond adapting a bestselling dark-comedy novel by Thomas Berger, about warring suburbanites. Its making is a somewhat well-documented nightmare during which Belushi relapsed and routinely flew off the handle. He and Aykroyd repeatedly clashed with director John G. Avildsen (who made the film between his two major touchstones, Rocky and The Karate Kid); in the biography Belushi, SNL writer Jim Downey claims the duo entertained the idea of hiring a hitman to take Avildsen out. And everybody but Aykroyd and Belushi hated the idea of them playing against type, proving that everybody but Aykroyd and Belushi is stupid except me, because it’s a genius move, and it defies expectations, and it proves Belushi was more than just Bluto from Animal House.

It also makes the film unforgettably strange, a peculiar curio of a movie that’s edited down to a high-density, borderline-nonsensical caboodle of fully loaded gags that are naughty, suggestive and sometimes flat-out surreal. There’s no coherent logic to the plot, which plays out like a frustration-dream Earl’s having where everyone speaks in circles, and characters appear and disappear like apparitions, and Tim Kazurinsky turns up as a lunatic tow-truck driver, and his sexual arousal never reaches fruition. That doesn’t stop Ramona from accusing him of “porking” her: “I wasn’t born with your hand in my bush,” she says, over dinner, in front of Vic and Enid, and everyone laughs and laughs, because Earl is a grade-A putz. The film follows the same track with a subsequent scene in which Ramona tries to seduce Earl through the mail slot, a priceless visual double-entendre.

We need to talk about the setting. It’s nondescript. It could be upstate New York, it could be Idaho, who gives a f—. It’s a cul-de-sac and at the end sits Earl’s squeaky-clean two-story with white siding and a sidewalk lined with his precious tulips. Nextdoor is Vic and Ramona’s big, slightly foreboding brick bungalow with an air of gloom to it. Between them is a behemoth electrical tower that occasionally crackles with visible sparks. On one side is a swamp full of toxic waste and quicksand. As in most suburban satires, it’s depicted as a circle in Hell where you starve because no local restaurants are open at 10pm on a Friday, or a purgatory where you sit around drinking wine and watching horribly depressing news reports, waiting to die.

OK, sure, Neighbors is, on the surface, a suburban satire. It’s clear that Earl is being shaken from his rut so he can live a little, but we need to push that idea further. Take into account the surreality of this mystifying day in his life, and the weirdly sour, pungent fruit of the comedy (an acquired taste that you should absolutely acquire), and you realize that Vic, Ramona and Enid are sowing chaos and luring Earl towards something best described as flat-out anarchy. I feel like Belushi – whose obsession with punk rock led him to unsuccessfully push for a soundtrack by the SoCal band Fear – would appreciate that if he were alive today. But Neighbors would be the end of the road for him.

P.S. I’ll leave the gunshot we hear over the closing credits up to interpretation. It might have something to do with the previous scene, in which Earl watches a commercial for funeral entombment on television. I just can’t will myself to believe that Belushi’s character dies in the final dark moments of his final movie. For me, it’s a morbid bridge too far.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.