“The Men Next Door” is a gay situation comedy that comes
across to me as “opera bouffe” without (much) music.
Doug (Eric Dean) experiences his fortieth birthday. His smoothness keeps him from resembling
Steve Carell (“The Forty Year Old Virgin”) too much. But he befriends a neighbor Colton (Benjamin
Lutz), although maybe not efficiently, when he tells Colton that Colton should
wax (there’s a little bit of chest scraggle, hardly visible without
BluRay.) Soon, Doug meets Colton’s dad
Jacob (Michael Nicklin), who is 50, and now, it turns out, is gay himself. Oh, yes, Colton has a straight brother. In time, Doug has to make a choice, as he
can’t date them separately forever. His
decision may indeed show the end of lookism.
There is a little room for seriousness in the backstory. Dad has to explain why he got married and had kids to begin with. It often happens.
A variety of other characters pop in to the Doug’ Valley
home. (The area rather looks like
Woodland Hills, as I remember it.) The
84-minute film, by Rob Williams (no relation to Robin) has a lot of short takes
and shifts that don’t exactly work for me.
The official site (Guest House Films and Wolfe) is here.
The film went so far as to be as lighthearted as possible
that it seemed to drift away. I watched
it o Netflix instant video.
If you take the title and change “Men” back to singular, you
get a title that sounds like it would belong to film noir. But not this film.
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