The ‘Burbs
“The ‘Burbs” tries to position itself somewhere between “Beetlejuice” and “The Twilight Zone,” but it lacks the dementia of the first and the wicked intelligence of the second and turns instead into a long shaggy dog story. It’s a story about some inquisitive neighbors who become worried when a new family moves into their neighbourhood, settles into a decaying Gothic house, which looks as out of place in such split-level suburbs as a tarantula on an angel food cake.
Who are these people? They never appear during day time, only at night where their basement windows flash with huge electric discharges while on rare occasions they can be seen digging holes in their backyard. What for? Dead bodies? Loot? Ghoulish and aloof like Addams Family members, they look like children born from under stones that have never seen light before.
It would be wrong to say the neighbors are annoyed. As a matter of fact, this sinister visit in a way cheers them up: It takes away their thoughts on mowing lawns or walking dogs. Ray Peterson (Tom Hanks), the protagonist starts his vacation right at the beginning of the story and instead of going fishing chooses to stay home and watch over his neighbors. His wife (Carrie Fisher) calls him childish but his neighbors (Bruce Dern & Rick Ducommun) are boys who just happen to look like adults.
Meanwhile, there are various snapshots from suburban life including scenes involving street gossips discussing how one neighbor allows his dog to poop on their lawns or how one woman prefers working in her garden only covered by halter tops. None of this material is as funny as it could have been because partly it seems recycled from fairly ancient notions about what suburbs really are (at least I continued waiting for Mr. Wilson or Dennis Menace walking down that street).
Joe Dante directed this movie remember he contributed that eerie segment to the “Twilight Zone” movie in which they cohabitated in a comic book dimension as people living together in an isolated farmhouse (they were the first Toons). However, this time he seems to have run out of steam and come up with a related idea at feature length.
It would have been one of the things that Joe Dante could have exploited the sheer fakery of those suburban sets. The street he shoots on may, for all I know, actually exist somewhere, but it looks for all the world like that permanent small town set they drive you through on the Universal Tour.
It’s hard to put your finger on exactly what’s missing from the movie. The performers do their best with what they are given and special effects are quite ambitious; still somehow there is no real conviction in this film. It’s all very obvious; we expect some main events to happen at some point and we’re correct. And when the little oddities about one family’s behavior finally come into relief, nothing much comes as a surprise.
That family is led, by the way, by a small pale fish faced doctor played by Henry Gibson (the Oscar nominee from “Nashville”).
When I saw him in the last part of the film, I noticed that his character was more intriguing than all those suburbanites we had been following since it started. Maybe this is what the movie needed: a funny reversal to frustrate our anticipation. Just a thought, shouldn’t it have been as though the regular suburbanites were malnourished nerds and a sinister Americana appeared in a new family? Just asking.
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