The Curator of Schlock #238 by Jeff Shuster

The Boy Next Door

Shouldn’t it be titled The Boy Next Store?

I want to make it clear that I never watched Star Trek: The Next Generation. That show is for nerds, and we don’t like nerds here at The Museum of Schlock. So while I didn’t watch TNG back in high school, I would often bully and torture poindexters that did. One day when I was giving one of these said poindexters a swirly, he recounted an episode of TNG to me. The crew of the Starship Enterprise discovered an Earthly casino on an alien planet complete with gamblers, cocktail waitresses, dealers, you name it.

Turns out a bunch of aliens created the casino and filled it with characters from a pulp novel tiled Hotel Royale. A NASA astronaut had it in his possession when he crash landed there with no way home. The aliens felt bad for him and created a little world for him based on the situations and characters from a terrible novel. The astronaut found it unbearable and died a miserable old man.

With my luck, I’d end up on alien planet based on 2015’s The Boy Next Door from director Rob Cohen.  Jennifer Lopez plays Claire Peterson, a high school Classics teacher (obviously).

Claire’s recently separated from her husband, Garrett (John Corbett of My Big Fat Greek Wedding fame). She’s spending her summer holidays taking care of her son, Kevin (Ian Nelson) and hanging out with her best friend, Vicky Lansing (Kristen Chenoweth), who also happens to be the vice principal at the high school Claire teaches at. Vicky keeps going on about how Claire’s husband had an affair with his secretary in San Francisco and how she smelled like chocolate chip cookies. “Gives a whole new meaning to expression ‘San Francisco treat,’” Vicky says.

Speaking of treats, a hunky 19-year old stud named Noah Sandborn (Ryan Guzman) has moved next door to Claire. Noah befriends Claire’s son, fixes her garage door, and buys her a first edition of Homer’s The Odyssey. That’s quite a feat considering it was written around 800 BC! And who knew they had bound books back then. Noah’s great taste in literature is equally matched by his six-pack abs and winning smile. He calls her over to his place, something to do with how to properly defrost a chicken, and they spend the night making sweet love.

Claire regrets it the next morning. She tells Noah it was wrong and can never happen again.

Noah doesn’t accept this and turns into a violent stalker. Dum dum dum! He manages to turn Claire’s son against his father after instructing Kevin on how shoot an orange with a Beretta. Did I mention Noah is a student at Claire’s high school and is enrolled in her Classics class? After Claire keeps rejecting him, he posts photos of their sweet lovemaking all over her English classroom. Claire manages to take them down before her class starts, but knowing now that Noah has the whole thing recorded has her worried.

Vicky and Claire come up with a plan to steal the footage, but this just leads to Vicky getting kidnapped and stabbed to death. Noah then kidnaps her husband and son. He sets a barn on fire. I think Claire gouges Noah’s eye out with her thumb. Oh, and it turns out that Noah murdered his own father by messing with the brakes on his car. Yeah, not a world I would wish to be recreated for me by Extra Terrestrials. Unless they’d let me live in one of the sweet suburban houses with a Playstation 4 and pizza delivery.

I could think of worse ways to spend the rest of my life.

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Photo by Leslie Salas.