Comedy with darker side

Press, 21 August 1989, Page 5

Comedy with darker side

The real trouble with Hanks, however, is that he is on holiday and has nothing better to do than spy on these mysterious

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“THE ’BURBS” Directed by Joe Dante Screenplay by Dana Olsen

The message of “The ‘Burbs” (Savoy) is for all kooks and psychos not to mess with suburbanites. This is spelt out quite clearly towards the end of the film, but the audience may still feel a little confused about this comedy’s actual point, mainly because we are never sure who poses the real threat — the residents of an average suburban street, or those odd, new neighbours who have just moved in.

“The ‘Burbs” certainly is not the kind of easygoing comedy we have come to expect from Tom Hanks, the boy next door of the 80s, and right from the start it takes on the darker tones we associate with its director, Joe Dante, who is best known for bringing mayhem to Middle America in “Gremlins.” The street is located on the Universal Studies backlot and has been used in many of television’s family comedies. It is still inhabited by average, if slightly boisterous people, but there is another house we have never seen in this setting before. The Klopeks’ place has the spooky appearance of a haunted house — the paint cracked and peeling, the vegetation overgrown. Although they have lived there for a month, hardly anyone has seen them. Late at night they have been seen digging in their backyard and ear-piercing, machine-like noise emanates from the bowels of the place. According to another neighbour, their last house burned to the ground. Every street I have ever lived in had a house something like that, and Dante recalls: “On my grandmother’s block there were people like that — they never mowed their lawn and they never came out, and they let their mail stack up and nobody ever knew where they were.”

newcomers. His paranoia is fed further by two other, supposedly normal neighbours. Bruce Dern is a Vietnam War veteran who still sees the enemy lurking behing every bush, and Rick Ducommun is one of the wimps who cannot help but volunteer to get other people into trouble. A little sanity is brought to the scene by Hanks’ wife, played by Carrie Fisher, who has come to earth from her “Star Wars” adventure. But before the end of the film, our intrepid heroes have managed to work up a lynch-mob mentality, break into the mysterious house, dig up the back yard and set the whole place on fire. Dante keeps the mystery going right to the end, with each sequence revealing yet another disturbing piece of information about the Klopeks, but the uneasy feeling one is left with is that the problem is actually located back in our own back yard. “Alien Nation” recently pointed at the unease felt by Americans forced to welcome strangers — such as Vietnamese boat people — to their shores. This xenophobia is developed even further in the “The ‘Burbs,” and perhaps such fears of strangers are not unique to Americans.

“The ‘Burbs” was intended as satire, rubbing our nose in our own provincialism and fears. As such it succeeds, but this is not the kind of message that the average cinemagoer wants to be given when he goes out for an evening’s entertainment. The more you think about it it becomes clear what a clever, crafty film “The ‘Burbs” is, but that does not mean you have to like it.