Unlike that “Dead and Breakfast” movie all the other horror websites shoved down your throats a few years back, “Neighborhood Watch” actually deserves the attention and great reviews it is getting. It really is a great, well done, and most importantly, disturbing film that you would be a fool to miss.
Adrien Trumbell (Nick Searcy) is one of the best and most demented characters to come out in a long time. We have all have had a creepy neighbor like him at one time or another and always wondered what fucked up things he might have been up to. In “Neighborhood Watch” he happens to be poisoning his neighbors with aborted pig fetuses and other unidentifiable disgusting crap.
Trumbell regularly listens to a religious radio show host who is obsessed with the evils of pornography and fortification, making Trumbell believe sex is disgusting. This leads him to operate on himself and jam needles into his own balls during a sort-of masturbation scene that would make anyone believe all those stories that it causes you to go blind. Actually a few of the scenes during the film may make you wish you were blind, and probably will have you turning away from the screen.
The film was inspired by two true stories told to director/writer Graeme Whifler. The first involved an ambulance attendant *“who used to bring in donuts and snacks for his fellow crew members. The people who kept eating this stuff were feeling sick all the time. It turned out he was putting rat poison in the donuts.”(“Didn’t that happen in ‘Flowers in the Attic’?” – Andrew) Yum! The second, better story, involves a man who, according to Whifler, “heard a news story on the radio about a guy who couldn’t stop thinking about sex. He was obsessed with it and it was driving him nuts. He believed that there must be a gland inside his body, near his kidney, that was causing the obsession. He opened himself up in order to reach the gland that he wanted to remove [and] tried to lift up his own kidney.”Whifler does a great job of combining these two stories, and together with the amazing special effects by Steve Johnson’s award winning Edge FX shop, he has put together some of the best stomach turning scenes I have ever seen.
“Neighborhood Watch” starts off when Bob and Wendi Peterson move into an abandoned suburban wasteland so Bob can start a new job with the Zeecor Corporation. They are welcomed to the neighborhood by a deaf couple that freak out and drive their car onto the front lawn, followed by a courtesy call from Trumbell, who delivers a welcome to the neighborhood box of candy that results in a case of explosive diarrhea. One can only wonder if the new town they moved into may be called Twin Peaks or something, except there are no dreams of backwards talking midgets here. There is only Trumbell, who is not too happy when they deny his gift of grape jelly, which contained the aforementioned aborted pig. Trumbell and his new neighbors soon start a war when Bob tries to start a neighborhood watch with no help from the local police and the other weird inhabitants of his new cozy little neighborhood. Things start to get really out of hand, but you’ll have to see the movie to find out how because it’s just too good to ruin.
As all horror movies go, you have to wonder why the Petersons don’t immediately get a hotel room after they catch Trumbell in their home and the police do nothing to help, especially when they find out Trumbell is the son of the old mayor and it looks like they will have to fend for themselves. I guess if they did decide to move we wouldn’t get the great tale that the movie tells, just like Jason Vorhees wouldn’t have such a high body count if some idiot didn’t keep opening Camp Crystal Lake. When a story sparks somebody in the theater to yell “Don’t go in there” because they are getting so caught up in the film, it’s what makes watching a movie like this so fun. You won’t be able to take your eyes off this movie, but at the same time you will definitely be squirming in your seat and peeking through your hands.
See Neighborhood Watch at SF Indie Fest in San Francisco
*Taken from the Neighborhood Watch Press Release we did not talk to the director.
