Rock 'n' roll. Sex and violence. It's all going to happen tonight.
After making Suburbia under the aegis of Roger Corman, the next step for Penelope Spheeris was to direct another film for his former company, New World Pictures. Released in 1985, The Boys Next Door is just as hard-edged and uncompromising as its predecessor, and its vision of a society that creates monsters like small-town psycho Roy (Maxwell Caulfield) is discomfiting to say the least. Introduced drawing a chalk outline around his best friend Bo (Charlie Sheen) in front of their school the night before graduation (some prank, fellas), the disaffected Roy contemplates joining the Marines because, as he puts it, "I've got stuff inside of me." Instead, the two of them crash a rich kid's party, steal his dog, and light out for Los Angeles so they can savor one last taste of freedom before reporting to their factory jobs come Monday morning.
Almost immediately upon their arrival within city limits, Roy shows how much of a loose cannon he is by viciously beating a gas-station attendant for "ripping" them off (a charge, to be fair, that the careless Bo leveled against the man). From there, they head to the beach, where Roy beans an old lady with a beer bottle and terrorizes a bikini-clad girl who jumps on the hood of his car while they're high-tailing it out of there. Things take a turn for the premeditated, though, when they go cruising around Hollywood, get picked up outside a gay bar, and take the unsuspecting man back to his West Hollywood apartment, where Roy lets his murderous impulses go unchecked -- and they come into possession of an unlicensed .38, which bodes ill for anyone else they come across.
While the boys get up to their mischief -- for which Bo is, for the most part, a bystander -- Spheeris and first-time screenwriters Glen Morgan and James Wong intercut scenes of the detectives (a green Christopher McDonald and grizzled Hank Garrett) on their trail. (Of special interest is their sensitive treatment of the dead gay man's lover, which is bracketed by the railings of a homophobic cop that thankfully do not go unanswered.) The end of the road is in sight, though, when they pick up the new-agey Angie (Patti D'Arbanville), to whom Bo becomes briefly attached, and lead the police on a frantic chase that deposits them in a shopping mall, where -- bringing us full circle -- another chalk outline is drawn, this time by the proper authorities.