Destroy All Neighbors

 Bill (Jonah Ray Rodrigues) is a pushover - a nerdy thirty-something who's terrified of direct confrontation and spends his days working as a sound engineer for other musicians while he toils away at his own prog-rock album on his time off.

 He's honestly not doing too bad- sure, he's been struggling with his epic masterpiece for years now, but that seems about normal for bedroom musicians, never mind one of the prog persuasion. His apartment is nice, even if the building around it isn't, and his live-in girlfriend (Kiran Deol) seems to love him.

 But people take advantage of and walk over him all the time. And in a horror comedy, that can only mean one thing: self-actualization via creative blood-letting!

  And so it is. To its credit, the script (by Mike Benner, Jared Logan and Charles A. Pieper) takes a few unexpected swerves on its way there. There's no rage virus, no demonic incursion here; Instead it has Bill unwittingly embark on an (accidental) serial manslaughter rampage.

 The first victim is a new obnoxious neighbour played with relish by Alex Winter; He's clearly having a ball chewing scenery as Vlad, an unholy mixture of Eastern European and Scottish stereotypes with some really grotesque makeup and prosthetics... even before he starts strutting around as a tangle of dismembered body parts.

 Because as Bill's body count grows, his undead victims start haunting him, An American Werewolf in London-style, but with a remarkably forgiving attitude towards their murderer. The movie ends up ticking a lot of the expected boxes, just maybe not in the expected or in a particularly effective way.

 Director Josh Forbes is mainly a music video guy, and he taps into that to keep the proceeds fairly stylish and pacey. The film's got a pretty good comedic timing. There are lot of visual effects - a lovely credits sequence by Rich Zim, a veteran animator who's worked done stuff for Laika and Adult Swim, and some cool old-school lightning effects in the finale, but the gore and creature effects are all practical. There's a lot of variety, and all of it looks pretty damn good.

 As much gore as there is, the tone is always light and overtly jokey. And some of the jokes are even good! Jon Daly scores a lot of laughs as an online prog-bass guru who tends to mix uncomfortable life stories in between his music lessons, which turn into tips on how to get rid of inconvenient corpses when the plot requires it. So does Ryan Kattner as Caleb Bang Jensen, a megalomaniac pop star who insists on being called by his full name every single time he's referred to. Mild stuff, but, like the movie as a whole, very likeable.

 All the rigamarole doesn't end up amounting to much, though there's a killer Prog-extravaganza finale that makes time for a yodelling interlude (hello, Focus!) and ends up draping Bill in something the Great Gonzo would wear at one of his shows.

 It might seem like a back-handed compliment to call it pleasant, but there's a place for low-stakes hangout movies like this where the most appealing part is watching the characters bounce off each other.