WEIRDLAND: Charlie Sheen in Penelope Spheeris's "The Boys next door" (ending scene)

Saturday, May 21, 2011

Charlie Sheen in Penelope Spheeris's "The Boys next door" (ending scene)

"Before he was famous, though, Sheen costarred in a nifty little B movie called The Boys Next Door (it was his first starring role — he was part of the young-gun ensemble in Red Dawn the year before), and if you watch it now, there are a lot of moments that fast-forward you to the Charlie Sheen we’ve come to know and be mesmerized by on whatever tabloid news show he’s popping up on at any given moment. In The Boys Next Door, Sheen and Maxwell Caulfield play California teenagers who celebrate the end of high school by going on a road trip that turns into a rampage.
The director was Penelope Spheeris, transitioning into dramatic features after the 1981 Los Angeles hardcore punk documentary The Decline of Western Civilization, and Spheeris gives her two stars room to roam. The Charlie Sheen you see in this movie isn’t just a tense and hungry actor. If John Hughes had ever made a dead-serious comedy about a heartless pair of sociopaths, that movie might have looked something like The Boys Next Door. It’s like a Hughes film crossed with In Cold Blood. Sheen, fresh-faced and scowling, with thatchy black hair and knitted eyebrows, looks in his white T-shirt like an Archie-comics version of Sid Vicious, but his character, Bo, is meant to be the pair’s quarter-of-the-way normal sidekick". Source: insidemovies.ew.com


The "boys next door" (directed by Penelope Spheeris in 1985) are Roy Alston (Maxwell Caulfield) and Bo Richards (Charlie Sheen), typical California teens freshly graduated from high school. Daunted by the prospect of the real world, the boys decide to go on one last fling in L.A. But it's not all clean, wholesome fun; in fact, Caulfield and Sheen launch their weekend bash by beating up a gas-station attendant, throwing a glass bottle at an old woman, and murdering gay-bar patron Chris (Paul C. Dancer). Somewhere along the line, Bo becomes repelled by their violence spree, but Roy seems to be sexually aroused by all the misery he's causing. And so it goes, without real rhyme or reason, until the bloody denouement.

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