Worst Neighbor Ever

All my life I’ve had incredible luck with my neighbors. The little old ladies who used to give my brother and I candy, or the other little old ladies who never gave us grief for being so very loud as we played in the quiet neighborhood. While in college the neighbor across the hall turned tricks to pay for school. She was nice and I learned a valuable lesson about sex workers. For the last thirty plus years our neighbors have done countless favors for us like cutting downed trees and fixing fences and housesitting, despite our massive political divide. One of my biggest fears has always been getting stuck next to a terrible neighbor, and this series went right to that fear. You can’t escape a bad neighbor without uprooting your whole life. Not everyone has the wherewithal to manage that.

I tuned into the first episode without realizing for a couple of minutes that it’s a series, but I was hooked pretty quickly. The first story was about a woman in rural Kentucky that got more and more crazy with neighbors who had once been friends with her. Just one look at the woman’s face jarred me back to my days of dealing with dangerously crazed Kentuckians. She had a look that I was familiar with, not in a good way, and then there was a bit in the episode about her being proud of going viral in a youtube of her being proudly racist. Yeah, I know her type.

The documentary moved along fairly slowly, and made a point of being thorough in their account of the victims’ history with each other, the neighborhood, the terrible neighbor. Interspersed with the standard talking heads of survivors and others close to the issue there are animated segments depicting events like family barbeques, bucolic rural life, a fistfight in the street. The filmmakers did a nice job, I thought, of documenting the steady decline of the terrible neighbor. She didn’t just one day do something heinous. It took a while for her to get there, and made people miserable along the way.

Including the police. Granted, it’s a teeny, tiny department, but if you’re going on a call EVERY SINGLE DAY to that address for over a year, how in the world can you later claim surprise that something bad happened? Really? After my shivery response to seeing the woman’s image, that was the most emotional part for me in this documentary. I found it to be the weakest part of the story the filmmakers weaved. They let the officer express his surprise and moved on. If it was me, I would be pummeling him with questions about just how stupid does he think I am to believe it. Other than that, it was an okay documentary, and I did like the animated segments.

The next episode hit even closer to home because the event happened about forty mile north of us and was in the news for a very long time. I used to watch the news back then so I knew right away where the story was headed. In a quiet, friendly, practically brand new neighborhood, a house blew up so much most of the surrounding neighborhood had to be torn down because the houses were too unstable to live in anymore. A nice young couple in the house next door, also blown to smithereens, died. There was a remarkably thorough investigation – I remember thinking that at the time – and the perpetrators were caught and put away for a long, long…long time.

This episode is a more straightforward documentary. There are fewer and shorter animated segments, though the explosion itself would have made more sense if it had been used. Talking heads dominate the first half and then the second half is more about the investigation and a small bit about the trial.

My takeaway from this episode was that the filmmakers were thorough in their depictions of the lead up to the explosion, giving good motives and introducing the viewer to people involved. I remembered a lot of what was gone over so it felt like a very good depiction of events. That makes me figure the other episodes are probably just as well balanced.

It’s easy for a documentarian to take sides, a feature I mentioned in my review of The Perfect Neighbor, which also saw the police being shocked, SHOCKED, when a person who called so often they knew the name of everyone in the neighborhood did something lethal. In the case of Worst Neighbor Ever, so far, I haven’t noticed that kind of blatant – even if it’s justifiable – bias toward the victims. I appreciate their ability to give the viewer some small amount of choice. Obviously, the stories they’ve chosen are heinous and scary if you’re afraid of bad neighbors like I am. But they don’t beat the viewer over the head, requiring them to choose sides and be emotional about it.

It’s not a ringing endorsement, and there is bias, but I appreciate the effort – however small – to give the viewer some autonomy. If you’re looking for some real life horror, I recommend this series. There are only four episodes (only on Netflix – sorry!) so far but I fully expect to watch the next two. I’ve long been a horror fan. Gauging how much I already knew of the events of the second episode against what is shown, I think it’s a fairly solid depiction of lead up, events, aftermath.

Edit to add – after sending in that review I used my insomnia to watch the next two episodes. A thread that runs through the series is how the system, specifically police agencies, not taking threats seriously leads directly to the death of people who tried to do things right. It’s infuriating, and deepens the horror of having to deal with rogue people you might be stuck with.

Triggers: people are murdered by horrible neighbors

Available: (sorry, only on) Netflix

LINKS:

• Worst Neighbor Ever – Official Website Netflix
• Worst Neighbor Ever – IMDB
• Worst Neighbor Ever – Wikipedia

CFR: In Addition

This looks fascinating and nope for me.

Nope. Nope. Nopity nope.

Or as The Oatmeal would say: