The Boy Next Door (Universal, Blumhouse Productions, Smart Entertainment, 2015)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I ran Charles and I a Blu-Ray disc of a movie I’d watched the first few minutes of on LIfetime several weeks ago, The Boy Next Door, a 2015 production from Universal starring Jennifer Lopez, directed by Rob Cohen and written by Barbara Curry. Clearly this film was made for theatrical release – it had a Universal logo on the front instead of one from MarVista Entertainment, Reel One Entertainment, Front Street Pictures, NB Thrilling Films, The Cartel, Hybrid or one of the other producing and distributing companies that supply Lifetime with their usual product. Also it starred a woman most people have heard of instead of someone like Lindsay Hartley or Boti Bliss, though she’s playing the usual Lifetime “pussy in peril” (as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd once called the generic Lifetime heroine). She’s Clare Peterson, who teaches English at the local John Monroe High School and for some reason has a literature class that specializes in Homer, of all people. Claire has been separated from her husband Garrett (John Corbett) for nine months, ever since she realized that on his frequent “business trips” to San Francisco he’s been having an affair with his company’s secretary – though I joked, “Since this is San Francisco, nothing actually happened. She kept asking me, ‘Do you have a sister?’” But she’s still frequently seeing Garrett because, even though she’s no longer interested in him as a husband, she wants their teenage son Kevin (Ian Nelson) to have a fatherly presence in his life.

Claire’s best friend, Allie Callahan (Lexi Atkins), is the vice-principal of her school – the principal is one of Lifetime’s African-American authority figures, Edward Warren (Hill Harper) – adn she’s urging Claire to sign the divorce papers and go on with her life already. At Allie’s urging, Claire goes on a double date but the guy who’s supposed to be her date partner, Ethan (Travis Schuldt), gets on her bad side by declaring his opinion that educating high schoolers in classical Greek literature is a waste of time because it does nothing to prepare them for the work world. She walks out on her date and into the arms of the titular Boy Next Door, Noah Sandborn (Ryan Guzman), who’s just moved into the house next door to take care of his aging and wheelchair-using uncle (Jack Wallace) who’s awaiting a bone-marrow transplant for cancer. With a severe case of the female equivalent of blue balls, Claire is all too willing to yield to the advances Noah makes on her and fulfills in a hot soft-core porn scene that no doubt was trimmed considerably for the Lifetime version – and of course Noah is instantly convinced that Claire is the Woman of His Dreams. Noah presents her with a present he claims is a “first edition” of The Iliad, saying he picked it up at a garage sale for $1; someone on imdb.com red-flagged this as a “goof,” pointing out that The Iliad is 3,000 years old, was written in classical Greek and the oldest surviving copies are on scrolls, but I figured what they meant by “first edition” was the first publication of that particular English translation in the late 19th century.

Noah transfers into John Monroe High School and fakes an e-mail to Principal Warren, ostensibly from Ciaire, requesting that Noah be put in her class. He shows up, much to her consternation, and when he threatens to reveal their affair (or at least their one-night stand) to the school authorities, she makes the mistake of telling him, “It’ll be your word against mine.” Then one day she shows up for work and finds that her classroom has been decorated with numerous prints of a photo showing her and Noah having sex – he used a secret camera to film them and has a video of the whole encounter on his computer. Claire locks her classroom for five minutes while she pulls down all the photos (and turns off the printer, which is busily spewing out more copies) and tries to throw them away. This arouses the suspicions and the ire of Principal Warren, who demands that Claire open the classroom door and let her students in at once, then chews her out for having not been herself lately. Meanwhile, Claire’s h husband Garrett takes their son Kevin out for a ride in his Dodge Challenger and even lets Kevin drive – only Kevin, who’s seeking outlets for his anger at the whole situation, takes the car up to 100 miles an hour on a winding mountain road. Dad tries to take over the controls and stop the car, then both of them realize that the brakes and the clutch have both stopped working. They ultimately crash the car into a line of yellow road barriers, filled with water, so they’re unscathed (and the sight of water erupting from one barrel after another is itself exciting) – but later both them and the car turn up at Claire’s home, and the car is visibly banged up but doesn’t look like it suffered the damage we saw in the previous scene. (One also wonders just how Garrett and Kevin got back; when Claire drove off from her home I presumed they’d called her and asked her to pick them up, but there’s no hint of that in the actual movie.)

Also, there’s a scene in which Claire sneaks into Noah’s home to find the camera with which he shot his clandestine sex video of them and the computer on which he’s storing it, until she’s caught not by Noah but by his disabled uncle (ya remember the disabled uncle?). In real life someone as computer-savvy as Noah has been established to be would have backed up that incriminating video file several places, including at least one off-site, but apparently Barbara Curry had never heard of “the cloud.” Claire also discovers on Noah’s computer diagrams of the braking systems of a Dodge Challenger – confirming her suspicions that Noah deliberately tried to kill the other two men in her life – and she also realizes that Noah killed his parents the same way, though Noah later tells her that his mom is still alive and the other woman killed in the car with his dad was a “whore” dad had left his mom for – men abandoning their wives for younger, cuter women seems to be a flash point for Noah and the only explanation we get for his psychopathology. Along the way Noah also manages to seduce Vicki Lansing (Kristen Chenoweth – a surprising role for her since it’s so short and there’s no singing), the high-school girl Kevin had a crush on, and the scene in which Vicki gives Noah head and Claire watches through the window from her own home is once again considerably more graphic than the version Lifetime’s viewers probably got.

Claire’s friend Allie suggests that she take Kevin to her place for a while to get away from her psycho stalker, but Noah beats her there, kills Allie and ties up both Garrett and Kevin, then pours gasoline over the floor of the garage where he’s holding them and threatens to burn them if Claire doesn’t agree to run off with him. Noah is also holding a gun on them, but somehow Claire manages to overpower him even as the garage starts burning, first sticking him in the eye with a hypodermic needle (I’m sure Barbara Curry, in a script full of Homeric allusions, intended this as a parallel to Odysseus’s blinding of the Cyclops in The Odyssey) and then she cuts loose an old engine block that was hanging from the ceiling and looses it to where it falls on Noah, taking him out permanently. (I couldn’t help but think of the Monty Python self-defense course parody, in which the instructor casually tells the class, “First you overpower him, then you drop a 16-ton weight on him.”) Fortunately Claire, Kevin and Garrett all get out alive and the experience convinces Claire to reunite with her husband at last (now that they’ve both “strayed” and are therefore morally equal again). Seeing The Boy Next Door on disc probably made it seem better than it would have on Lifetime – there were no commercial interruptions to break the tension Rob Cohen vividly created with his suspense direction, a longer soft-core porn scene than the one TV viewers presumably got, and also the frequent uses of the word “shit” weren’t blipped out the way they would have been on Lifetime. The Boy Next Door is actually a pretty good movie; it’s hardly a deathless classic, but it does what it set out to do and makes for exciting entertainment.