Thrillers are almost my favorite genre, simply because you can get a sleeker looking film with just as many thrills as a standard horror film, but also can avoid about half of the annoying teenagers in the theater as well. It’s a fair trade for nightmares, but something about obsession thrillers have always stuck with me, from the first time my grandmother showed me “Fatal Attraction” on VHS, or when I took my grandparents to see “Obsessed” in theaters, or even when my grandmother and I watched “No Good Deed” over winter break, they’ve always been a good source of fun…usually involving my grandmother. But I began to see a patter, they all started blending together, and following the same plot system each time, and the genre lost it’s effect on me. So when I saw “The Boy Next Door” coming out with Jennifer Lopez, I thought I could give it a shot, prove me wrong, leave me admitting my mistakes on here.

You will get no such admittance today.

“The Boy Next Door” is terrible, with no excuses whatsoever to defend the way that it ended up on screen. Leading the atrocities is our friendly neighborhood JLo, who still looks like JLo, despite being a suburban mon, is horribly miscast as Claire Peterson, a school teacher pondering divorce from her unfaithful husband (John Corbett). Claire soon meets the nephew of her next door neighbor, Noah Sandborn (Ryan Guzman), who befriends her son, Kevin (Ian Nelson). Noah is a 19 year old orphan returning to finish high school. After “accidentally” sleeping with Noah and calling their relationship off, Claire begins to see disturbing and obsessive behavior in Noah, seeking help from her best friend Vicky (Kristin Chenoweth), this kickstarts our movie.

The acting is terrible, but it didn’t have to be, I’ve seen most of these actors do solid work in other pieces, especially Kristin Chenoweth, who is one of the best stage actresses of this generation, but she hams it up here. Perhaps it was because of the toilet paper roll they called a script that contributed to the poor acting, but I know that this cast can do better, even if marginally.

Rob Cohen’s direction is fine in the quieter, more cut and dry scenes, but whenever any sort of action occurs, the film turns into something of an R-rated Lifetime movie, and even then that would feel like a compliment to some of the work done here. Like I said before, the script is terrible, to the point that I was laughing harder than any comedy I’ve seen in a while. It’s hard to call that a compliment, but that’s about the only thing positive I can say about it, except maybe that I liked the song in the credits? I don’t think that counts. The time transitions are terrible, the dialogue is horrible, the so-called “menace” the villain is supposed to portray seems taken straight out of a spoof movie.

Producer Jason Blum has a lot of success in his repertoire, but he needs to stop accepting any movie which comes his way, or his reputation will wither and die just like my soul did watching “The Boy Next Door”. Everything was far too convenient to make sense, nothing ever added up. Everything was simply lazily made, the acting was poor, the script was hilarious, the visual effects were horrific, and the movie isn’t thrilling in the slightest. Even Kristin Chenoweth couldn’t save this with some comic relief, but hey, it was only 91 minutes. Unless you have some sort of sadistic “I want to see a terrible movie” vendetta going on against yourself currently, just stay home this weekend, and don’t go next door.

1/5

Directed by: Rob Cohen
Starring: Jennifer Lopez, Ryan Guzman, John Corbett, Ian Nelson and Kristin Chenoweth.
Runtime: 91 minutes
Rating: R for violence, sexual content/nudity, and language.

Universal Pictures presents, a Blumhouse/Smart Entertainment/Nuyorican production, a film by Rob Cohen “The Boy Next Door”