Neighbors

Neighbors is a 1981 American black comedy film based on the novel of the same name by Thomas Berger. It was released through Columbia Pictures, was directed by John G. Avildsen, and starred John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Cathy Moriarty, and Kathryn Walker. The film takes liberties with Berger's story and features a more upbeat ending. The screenplay of the film is officially credited to Larry Gelbart, although it was extensively rewritten to Gelbart's public disapproval. Released two and a half months before Belushi's death, the film marks his last film performance. In the film, a middle class-resident of a suburb has increasingly hostile relationships with his two next-door-neighbors. He eventually decides to play a prank on his male neighbor, but unintentionally abandons the neighbor's truck in a swamp. The neighbor retaliates with vandalism. The suburbanite soon realizes that he enjoys this conflict more than the last few decades of his mundane life. Plot Low-key, ineffectual, middle-class suburbanite Earl Keese's peaceful, dreary life changes when a younger couple, Vic and Ramona Zeck, move in next door. Upon arrival, the Zecks immediately impose themselves on the Keese household, with Earl infuriated with the loud, gung-ho Vic, and flustered by the sly and seductive Ramona who tries to seduce Earl numerous times. Earl is frustratingly unable to handle them, and can never produce any proof that the couple are deliberately doing anything wrong. Earl's wife Enid and teenage daughter Elaine are unhelpful, and that very night, the antagonism between Earl and the Zecks escalates into full-scale suburban warfare. Earl tries to hide Vic's truck as a joke, only for it to get stuck in a swamp pond beside his house. Vic retaliates by vandalizing Earl's car. When Earl calls for a tow truck to remove Vic's truck from the swamp, Vic locks him in the basement of his own house. In the morning, after Vic's truck is towed out of the swamp, he retrieves a remote controlled toy model airplane from his truck which he accidentally crashes and burns his house down. Earl offers Vic his own house to stay in, suspecting that Vic set fire to his new house to collect an insurance payment. But the film's climatic twist comes when Vic and Ramona Zeck reveal to Earl that they not only have no money and no insurance, but they are not legally married and that they do not own the house.