Penelope Spheeris eventually found her niche as a director of light frothy comedies, but this particular effort was on quite the other side of the spectrum. The Boys Next Door follows the lives of two seemingly normal 18 year olds who carve out their identities within their community by assuming the roles of non conforming pranksters at first but soon it becomes evident that these tendencies are far more deep rooted and dangerous.

The two find themselves (naturally) ostracised by their fellow peers and find themselves on the fringe of society - shunned almost everywhere they turn up, not without good reason as their antics are bestial at best. The drifters (played by Charlie Sheen and Maxwell Caulfield) come from dysfunctional homes, blighted by rupture and poverty with a future that consists of working for the rest of their days for a pittance at the local factory. Teen age drop outs with no prospects and with a dark and desperately bleak future awaiting them. There are indicators suggesting that bubbling below the surface of their non conformity is a murderous, almost psychotic rage. Killing animals by running them over is just one indicator of darker things to come and then Caulfield explains that there is "something inside him" that galvanizes him - a rage that we find is just waiting to explode, and once it does there is no turning back. The two drifters, feeding off each other and indeed needing each other in order to put their demented thoughts into motion decide to take a trip to Hollywood and have a bit of a vacation before taking up their inevitable jobs of drudgery at the local factory.

Suddenly Caulfield's character snaps and the monster within him comes to the surface and then the two teenagers embark on a mindless spree of violence which has to end in disaster. The film scores points for not being overly sentimental or moralizing or attempting to explain the motivations for why these seemingly normal kids turn into senseless, utterly immoral monsters. The director provides enough reason and evidence in the backdrop - we learn about the lack of love, the lack of nurturing, the lack of any functioning family which leads to the isolation and rejection of the two young lads within their environment and how they escape reality by slipping into an uncontrollable all consuming rage.

Maxwell Caulfield, so embarrassingly awful as Miles from the infamous Colby's soap opera does a reasonable job strutting around like a tightly strung coil waiting to snap from the tension. Charlie Sheen also turns in a solid performance just before he set out to short lived glory in Platoon. Perhaps not he most potent or the most interesting profile of budding serial killers the film is none the less fairly illuminating and chilling with its recurring message that most of history's worst serial killers were just regular, everyday average Joe's who one wouldn't be able to distinguish from that harmless "Boy Next Door". The films strength is in its understated manner yet most critics found the film too ambiguous for their liking.