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Connections, in both directions
Lopez is suitably gung-ho with her succession of terrified reactions, but the biggest problem is that Guzman is mostly a smirking bore, too blandly handsome and one-note to give his character the attention-must-be-paid, home-wrecking spirit of a Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction."
"The Boy Next Door" is rather obviously a gender-flipped version of "Fatal Attraction," the 1987 classic about an extramarital fling that turns into a nightmare.
The story is a gender inversion of Fatal Attraction (1987), filtered through a few recent scandals in which female high school teachers were caught fooling around with male students: the heroine (Lopez) is seduced by a charming hunk (Ryan Guzman) who's just transferred to her school, but he turns psycho on her when she rejects his subsequent advances.
1987's "Fatal Attraction," 1996's "Fear," and a whole lineage of similarly plotted "...From Hell" thrillers welcome a new descendant with "The Boy Next Door," producer Jason Blum's latest micro-budget effort from genre-centric Blumhouse Productions.
It's more a "Banal Delusion" than a "Fatal Attraction," though.
Biker Boyz (2003)
Directed by Reggie Rock Bythewood
influenced by The Fast and the Furious (2001)
Plot Themes
A shameless rip-off of “The Fast And The Furious,” “Boyz” uses motorcycles in place of 10-second cars, but the rest of the picture follows the 2001 smash rather severely.
Thematically, it looks backward and forward at once: back to old school Westerns (the aging hero confronts the young gun) and forward to the next logical step in the genre most raucously represented by The Fast and the Furious.
It should come as little surprise that "Biker Boyz" is so similar to "The Fast and the Furious," right down to the incredibly vacuous script and a soundtrack full of hip-hop and rock songs that enslaves the story rather than serving it.
It all amounts to one of the silliest movies around, a laughable piece of posturing that makes "The Fast and the Furious" look like a model of restraint.
Set in the world of street bike racing, it smacks of " The Fast and the Furious ".
Supposedly based on a real subculture in southern California, "Biker Boyz" is "The Fast and the Furious" on two wheels, with an Oedipal subtext thrown in.
Though it could very easily be summed up as “The Fast and the Furious with motorcycles,” Torque is a clone endowed with a pleasant self-awareness, even taking the time to poke fun at its progenitor.
Another ‘new wave’ exploitation flick from the producer of The Fast and The Furious , Torque is as fast-paced and loud as it is dumb.
Scribe Matt Johnson 's attempted jibe at The Fast and the Furious is absolutely pathetic; in one scene, Ford repeats Vin Diesel 's infamous, "I live my life a quarter mile at a time," and Shane sneers something about that being the dumbest line she's ever heard.
All the advertising plays up the fact that it is "from the producer of The Fast and the Furious ," and from the initial indications in Torque, it appears that the movie itself falls all too closely in line with that thinking, with director Joseph Kahn going out of his way to evoke--rather, completely and shamelessly carbon copy--that high-speed hit.
First time director Kahn lobs in quotations from Duel and lifts two fingers in the direction of The Fast and the Furious, but the chase on, through and in front of a Trans-Am train isn't believable for a second, and the effects in the climactic pursuit have Cheap Video Game written all over them.
Viewers have come to expect an alternative universe within "The Fast and the Furious" and its sundry clones where the races mix interchangeably, the women are all post-breast enlargement puffy, and posted speed limits are signposts to be mocked.
Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
Directed by Nicholas Ray
influenced The Fast and the Furious (2001)
Plot Themes
An updating (or rip-off) of sorts of "Rebel Without a Cause" (1955), this movie finds troubled teen Sean Boswell (Lucas Black) shipped off to live with his estranged father in Tokyo when his mother grows tired of dealing with his constant drag-racing antics.
"The Fast and the Furious" is "Rebel Without a Cause" without a cause.
Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
Directed by Vincente Minnelli
influenced The Boy Next Door (2015)
Music Visuals
Back in 1944, "The Boy Next Door" was a popular tune sung by Judy Garland in the musical masterpiece Meet Me in St. Louis.
We've certainly come a ways since Judy Garland sang “The Boy Next Door” in Vincente Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis!
Remember an incandescent Judy Garland standing in a moonlit window in the 1944 screen musical Meet Me in St. Louis, wistfully pining for the boy next door, whom she doubts knows she even exists?
Rob Cohen’s “The Boy Next Door” is an unintentionally funny resurrection of the “Fatal Attraction” template, but it actually bears a closer resemblance to “Fear,” James Foley’s 1996 pseudo-thriller in which Mark Wahlberg, then just beginning his big-screen career, played a handsome young man who became dangerously obsessed with a sweet high-school student played by none other than Reese Witherspoon, whose resume was also pretty thin at the time.
1987's "Fatal Attraction," 1996's "Fear," and a whole lineage of similarly plotted "...From Hell" thrillers welcome a new descendant with "The Boy Next Door," producer Jason Blum's latest micro-budget effort from genre-centric Blumhouse Productions.
Fatal Attraction, Single White Female, whatever that one with Mark Wahlberg was called (it was called Fear, I’m just trying to pretend like I don’t remember it); In recent years, though, the subgenre seems to have fallen out of favor, except on Lifetime probably.
I see a bit of influence here from the British director Joanna Hogg, with the same haunted, long shots as Hogg’s 2010 film Archipelago, and a respect for drawn-out silences reminiscent of last year’s Exhibition.
I mean, there’s an actual line of dialogue about Sidney Lumet’s The Wiz – AND THEN ITS RELEVANCE IS EXPLAINED BY A BULLISH SKATER PUNK.
I wish "The Boy Next Door" were a different, zingier sort of mediocrity, but whenever it threatens to go the full Zalman King "Two Moon Junction" route, it pulls back and behaves itself and settles for a grindingly predictable series of escalations.
Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019)
Directed by David Leitch
influenced by The Fast and the Furious (2001), xXx (2002)
Plot
In case you’ve lost count, there’ve been eight, starting with The Fast and the Furious back in 2001.
In 2001 we were introduced to Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel, xXx), Brian O'Conner (Paul Walker, Running Scared) and a host of other colorful characters in Universal Pictures' The Fast and The Furious.
If you removed the “Fast & Furious Presents” label from Hobbs & Shaw before showing the film to a person who had only seen 2001’s The Fast and the Furious, there’s a good chance they would never suspect the two were connected.
Once upon a time, in the summer of 2001, a young and only moderately swole Vin Diesel appeared in The Fast and the Furious as Dominic Toretto, an L.A. ex-con who organized drag races, stole DVD players off the backs of trucks, and got in trouble with the local law.
And it is instructive to consider how a story that technically began 18 years ago in 2001’s “The Fast and the Furious,” about an undercover LAPD officer trying to find the identities of a group of car-hijackers, has wrought this film, where a former British Special Forces assassin and an American federal agent must team up to save the world from a eugenicist MI6 agent who has gone rogue.
In 2001 we were introduced to Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel, xXx), Brian O'Conner (Paul Walker, Running Scared) and a host of other colorful characters in Universal Pictures' The Fast and The Furious.
The Boy Next Door is behind the times, a relic of an era where the runaway, zeitgeist-capturing success of Fatal Attraction created an entire subgenre of paranoid thrillers about how the greatest threat to a family’s survival was someone intimately close: a nanny (The Hand That Rocks The Cradle), a cop (Unlawful Entry), or, in the case of William Friedkin’s The Guardian, a sexy nanny who’s also a vengeful wood nymph.
Various references to Vin Diesel and The Fast And The Furious are thrown into the mix.
I see a bit of influence here from the British director Joanna Hogg, with the same haunted, long shots as Hogg’s 2010 film Archipelago, and a respect for drawn-out silences reminiscent of last year’s Exhibition.
Gone in 60 Seconds (1974)
Directed by H.B. Halicki
influenced The Fast and the Furious (2001)
Plot Themes
In a nutshell, this is everything Gone in 60 Seconds should have been: loud, mindless, entertaining rubbish.
It's a refreshing change from such no-plot, all-action movies as "Gone in 60 Seconds."
The Fast and the Furious puts the lie to wannabe also-rans like Driven and Gone in 60 Seconds -- it's got the goods for real, and it delivers them wrapped in a shroud of speed and wild-eyed, hi-test fun.
Over the past year, we've had a couple of auto-based, adrenalin rush pics with "Gone in 60 Seconds" and "Driven."
This is no gentle love story of a man and his cars, you know, like Nic Cage in Gone In 60 Seconds, this is a deflowering visit to the automotive brothel.
After the duds "Gone in 60 Seconds" and "Driven", it's actually refreshing to see a film that understand that "fast car movies" should feature...well, fast cars.
While Curry writes her antagonist as an innocent hunk with a dark past, Guzman’s wry comments and blatantly sexual advances increase with a hilarious brand of psychotic ignorance that blends Dan Stevens’ portrayal in The Guest (on a much more ineffective level) with blind, immature infatuation à la The Roommate or any other teen stalker flick.
Adam Wingard’s recent thriller “ The Guest ” transformed a similar premise into something brilliant, but “The Boy Next Door” — directed by Hollywood veteran Rob Cohen (whose credits include the first “The Fast and the Furious,” in 2001) — is more cracked than inspired.
There are moments in the film, primarily in its first third, where the combination of music and speeding cars blend into an abstraction that places the movie squarely in the company of something like Koyaanisqatsi , rather than The Fast and the Furious .
Walker attempts a McQueen's "Bullitt" or "Le Mans" but is woefully low on charisma.
Noah’s image of himself as a romantic “hero,” combined with his dirty white T-shirt, suggests an oblique critique of the Ryan Gosling desperado mystique in “The Notebook” and “Drive.”
For some viewers, “The Boy Next Door” will serve as a sort of sequel to another of Lopez’s damsel-in-distress flicks, 2002’s “Enough” (the two films are unrelated), while also conjuring up everything from “Fatal Attraction,” “Obsessed” and “No Good Deed.”
And, although the beast is a lot more impressive here than the one featured in 1981's Dragonslayer, not even the thrill of a dragon attack can save this film.
For some viewers, “The Boy Next Door” will serve as a sort of sequel to another of Lopez’s damsel-in-distress flicks, 2002’s “Enough” (the two films are unrelated), while also conjuring up everything from “Fatal Attraction,” “Obsessed” and “No Good Deed.”