On paper, The Boy Next Door was an easy movie to market, which would surely go some way to explaining how on earth it managed to earn $52 million at the box office on a $4 million budget, despite being ridiculed by audiences and panned by critics.
Blumhouse produced the erotic thriller, which was directed by The Fast and Furious and xXx‘s Rob Cohen, with Jennifer Lopez in the lead role. That’s a decent array of talent for a low budget genre effort that only had to tick a couple of boxes in order to succeed on any level other than a commercial one, although it would be fair to say that it left them steadfastly unchecked.
Lopez plays a newly-single high school teacher, who ends up having a one night stand with the handsome teenager that moved in next door. As well as regretting her mistake personally and professionally, she soon realizes that her brief dalliance has brought dangerous, and possibly even deadly, consequences for her family.
The Boy Next Door doesn’t have a particularly high bar to clear in order to deliver trashy entertainment, but it’s more of a self-serious slog than the deliriously unhinged delight it really should have been. A 12% Rotten Tomatoes score and 33% user rating sums things up rather nicely, as does Lopez’s Razzie nomination for Worst Actress, but it’s nonetheless become a Netflix success story over the weekend.
As per FlixPatrol, The Boy Next Door has reached the Top 10 most-watched list in several countries, proving that subscribers sometimes want nothing more than cheesy nonsense to whittle away the hours.