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It’s time for another stop on the Monday Movie Meme tour where participants are treated to a show each week by The Madlab Post and I until The Bumbles returns to center stage. The topic for this week is….Neighbours from Hell! This week’s topic is inspired by a jerk man in the Army Nicole met earlier this summer who has been experiencing the problems that come with having an overbearing and unpleasant neighbour.

Movies that feature neighbours that make you want to relocate or wish you never moved into a particular place of residency in the first place. These neighbours are usually rude, crude and sometimes have nothing else better to do than annoy the heck out of others around them. Here are my movie selections for this “Neighbours from Hell” topic.

I had to think about this topic but I think I managed to come with a couple of good ones. First up is a Tim Robbins movie, Arlington Road. This gritty thriller about Michael Faraday, played by Jeff Bridges who suspects that his neighbour Oliver Lang (Tim Robbins) is really a terrorist with a dark past and murderous intentions. Its a real gripper and I really should watch it again. The movie gives a real insight into neighbourly paranoia and makes you wonder just what your own neighbours around the corner may be up to. The movie also stars Joan Cusack as Lang’s wife.  Worth a watch for sure.

Next up is one of the greatest movies ever made in the horror/thriller genre. By one of the masters of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, Rear Window is possibly a movie that defined a generation of thriller movies. Its use of a small setting where all the neighbours can see each other in the complex they live gives us the viewer that sense of claustrophobia and the lack of mobility suffered by the main character L.B. Jeffries (James Stewart) owing to the fact that he is temporarily in a wheelchair makes what he is actually doing by spying on the apparently wife murdering neighbour Lars Thorwald played by Raymond Burr all the more dangerous by the end of the movie. A true classic.

Lastly today I think Frank Fitts, played by Chris Cooper, who is neighbour to Kevin Spacey‘s Lester Burnham in the movie American Beauty tries to deal with his own issues, the regimentalised Marine Corp officer doesn’t have the social skills to deal with them very effectively and when Burnham, who is in the midst of his own mid life crisis, begins to hang out with teenagers including Fitts’ own son, the gun loving, socially inept Colonel cannot keep his emotions in check and to put it simply, goes off on one. Some really good performances though and its not the sort of character I would like to have in my block, thats for sure.

So please join in and suggest some neighbours from hell in movies that you have seen and remember and check out other paticipating blogs and link back. Thanks for stopping by and reading.