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This 1989 film captures the nuances of suburbia, especially how one family starts to unlock the mystery surrounding their neighbors. They move in next door, and this family is peculiar to say the least, so much so that curtains are drawn to hide them from plain sight during the day. The film attempts to merge the concepts of The Twilight Zone and Beetlejuice. However, it doesn’t bring out the intelligence from the second concept or the dementia of the first. Instead, it relies on vague pieces stitched together clumsily over an overarching slideshow like story. These neighbors become obsessed with the family and are quite sad to say the least with their perception of reality, much like the ghoulish Addams Family.
To say the neighbors are irritated would be to misrepresent them. It seems that the neighbors are entertained by this odd event: now they have something else to preoccupy themselves with instead of mowing their lawns or walking their dogs. Ray Peterson, who is portrayed by Tom Hanks, starts his vacation just when the plot begins. Rather than go out for fishing, he decides to stay home and peep at the neighbors. His wife, played by Carrie Fisher, thinks he is engaging in childish games. However, his neighbors, played by Bruce Dern and Rick Ducommun, are adult children and fully embrace the idea.
At this point, the film combines all the little pieces together for a balanced view of life in the suburbs, including the neighbor who lets his dog defecate on other people’s lawns as well as the housewife who does all her yard work in the most revealing of halter tops. In large part, I suspect these are composite characters intended for social commentary shorthand because none of these stereotypes are as amusing as they could have been. Part of the problem stems from the fact that they appear cobbled together from rather dated notions of suburbs (I kept waiting for Dennis the Menace or Mr. Wilson to stroll down the street).
It is Joe Dante’s film, based on an episode where an isolated farmhouse had people living in it like a comic to be enjoyed. He contributed to the eerie segment in the Twilight Zone film. In his last project, Joe Dante’s film, he had a semblance of an idea, but didn’t pursue it further. For example, the public imprecisely uses the very suburb sets he does. The street he sets on might, 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.
What is value is incredibly baffling as most of the content is self explanatory. The special effects seem to defy the laws of physics, but the actors do every thing within their abilities. There is absolutely no willingness to put any real effort into this film. It’s straightforward; we guess the key happenings in the tale and so do many others. And when the explanation for the strange family’s behavior finally arrives, it is a net gain of unnecessary change.
By the way, that family is led, cadaverously pale and possessing a fish like visage is doctor played by Henry Gibson. He is the Oscar nominee from Nashville.
It struck me how his character was more engaging than the suburbs’ residents we were getting accustomed to in the last scenes. Perhaps the movie lacked a bit a humorous contradiction to plague all of our preconceived notions. Imagine if all the nondescript suburbanites were malnourished nerds, and the new all-American family that moved to the neighborhood was the actual sinister family. Just thinking.
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