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In Bad Neighbours, Seth Rogan has created a film that will actively repel awards. The polar opposite of a piece Tom Hanks or Meryl Streep Oscar-bait, Bad Neighbours is crass, nasty — and very, very funny.

Bad Neighbours

Bad Neighbours — the film is simply called “Neighbors” in the US; in Britain and Australia, as well as here in New Zealand, it’s Bad Neighbours, both because that’s the correct spelling and, presumably, to make it clear that there’ll be nothing inappropriate involving Harold, Bouncer and Mrs. Mangle — tells the story of Mac (Rogen) and Kelly (Rose Byrne) Radner, new parents who, shortly after moving into a pleasant, leafy suburb, find that, moving in next door to them is a fraternity from the local university. The story is simple — after Mac and Kelly fail dismally at trying to keep things neighbourly with the frat house next door, each tries to make life more uncomfortable for the other.

The plot really, though, is less there to tell a story and more to provide an excuse for a broad and quite effective range of the kind of bodily-function humour, ranging from lactation to at-will erections, that you’d expect from director Nicholas Stoller, whose previous directing credits include Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Get Him To The Greek, which he also wrote. It’s not a great film, but not all films have to be. Bad Neighbours manages to be consistently very funny indeed — Rogan is playing to his strengths, and his performance is what you’d expect of him in a film like this. Rose Byrne is also impressive as Kelly, working well with Rogan in some of the film’s stronger scenes. She’s a little understated in quite a few scenes, which is rather a shame, since she’s clearly capable of much more than she offers here.

Less impressive is Zac Effron as Teddy Sanders, the fraternity president. Effron has clearly been watching altogether more early Rob Lowe films than is entirely good for him, and, questionable eyeliner and all, is definitely channelling Lowe — it would have been much more entertaining to see him try to play a character by himself instead of via his hero. More annoying than that, though, is Dave Franco, who plays Teddy’s sidekick Pete with an almost total absence of subtlety, relying largely on that most annoying of American attempts at rhetoric, the habit of declaiming each sentence with increasing volume until the last word is all but shouted. It’s annoying when actual Americans do it; it’s even worse when it’s shown on screen as something that should be imitated.

Bad Neighbours is not a film that deals with complex historical or social issues. It’s not groundbreaking or innovative — it’s simply the latest in a long string of films that can be traced back to the Ur-text of all frat movies, Animal House, via much of Judd Apatow’s and Seth Rogan’s back catalogues. It really won’t be troubling any awards committees in the foreseeable. But see it anyway. It’s really, really good fun.