Earl Keese is an uptight and conservative man leading a monotonous life on a dead-end street in a suburban neighborhood, alongside his dismissive wife, Enid.
The Zecks immediately impose themselves on the Keese household, with Earl quickly overwhelmed by Vic's quick-talking ways and flustered by Ramona's sexual overtures.
Earl returns home to find Ramona in his bed, and they almost have sex before they are interrupted by a panicked Vic, who has flown a remote-controlled model airplane into his house, starting a fire that burns it down.
Over dinner, Earl suggests they escape their stagnant lives and move to the city, believing Vic deliberately burned his house down for a substantial insurance payment which can fund their new lifestyle.
Earl settles back into the mundanity of his former life, while Elaine returns to boarding school and Enid leaves for an emergency class on Native American studies.
Columbia Pictures acquired the rights to film the novel and assembled a high-profile cast and crew: Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown had produced Jaws (1975); John G. Avildsen had won an Academy Award for directing Rocky (1976); veteran comedy writer Larry Gelbart had developed the hit TV series M*A*S*H (1972–1983); and John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd had been stars of TV's Saturday Night Live (on which they appeared from 1975 to 1979) and the film The Blues Brothers (1980).
Avildsen also argued with producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown, and screenwriter Larry Gelbart objected to the changes made to his screenplay by Dan Aykroyd.
Upset with Belushi's antics and believing that Fear's music was inappropriate for Neighbors, the movie studio eventually forced the band off the soundtrack project.
The final version of Neighbors was released to cinemas in December 1981 and it received mixed reaction from both critics and from some fans of Belushi and Aykroyd, who did not like that they played the complete opposite character types that they usually would.
Columbia Pictures made sure to open the film in a larger than expected number of theatres because they anticipated it would draw a very large initial turnout from fans of its two stars, and could do well for the holiday season before being derailed by poor word-of-mouth.
David Ansen, writing for Newsweek Magazine, wrote: Thomas Berger's paranoid comic novel could have been made a fascinating movie in the hands of, say, Roman Polanski, who knows how to make a comedy of menace.
Just how much blame falls on Larry Gelbart's disjointed script is hard to say (Avildsen could make any writer look bad), but without question Bill Conti has come up with the year's most offensive score – a cattle prod of cartoonish cuteness that only underlines the movie's desperate uncertainty of tone.
[2]Roger Ebert, reviewing for the Chicago Sun-Times, awarded the film three stars out of four, and wrote that "Neighbors is a truly interesting comedy, an offbeat experiment in hallucinatory black humor.
"[3] In his book Guide for the Film Fanatic, Danny Peary wrote, "I think this surreal comedy is imaginatively done, and perfectly conveys the lunacy of the two comics...I'm glad they went against type because both actors are at their absolute best."