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The ‘Burbs’ attempts to fit somewhere in between ‘Beetlejuice’ and ‘The Twilight Zone,’ but lacks the first’s lunacy while forgoing the second’s acute wit, and instead becomes a protracted shaggy dog tale. The plot revolves around a family of busybody neighbors who begin to worry when a new family moves into their neighborhood and settles into an old decaying Gothic house that looks as out of place in the split-level suburbs as a tarantula on an angel food cake.
Who are these people? They never show themselves during the day, but at night their basement windows flicker and sparkle with massive bursts of electricity and occasionally, they can be spotted in their backyard, covered in dirt. For what? Graves? Treasure? They are somewhat similar to the Addams Family, strange and distant. They look as though they sprouted from under a boulder, having never seen the daylight.
It would not be accurate to say the neighbors are annoyed. To tell the truth, they appear to find some good cheer in this ominous incursion: For once, they have something else to think about besides dog walking and mowing lawns. The protagonist of the story, Ray Peterson (Tom Hanks), begins his vacation in the early parts of the film. Rather than going fishing, he decides to remain at home and watch over his neighbors. His wife (Carrie Fisher) thinks this is childish behavior. It’s fine so long as his overgrown boyish neighbors (Bruce Dern and Rick Ducommun) are supportive of this hobby.
At the same time, the film features numerous little sketches of suburban life, including the telltale sign of the neighbor who lets his mutt make messes on other people’s yards and the housewife who does her cleaning on the yard in the shortest of yard tops. All these details are not nearly as hilarious as they could have been, primarily because they seem to be drawn from quite outdated notions of how suburban America looks (I was waiting for Mister Wilson and Dennis the Menace to stroll around the neighborhood).
Joe Dante directed the movie. He added that disturbing part to the “The Twilight Zone” movie that dealt with people in an isolated farmhouse who all seemed to live in some imaginary realm. (That was when they were the original Toons). He appears to be devoid of ideas this time regarding a feature-length film. One of the things he could have exploited was the very falsehood of the suburban sets he used. I do not know if the street he shoots on exists, but it resembles the permanent small-town set they take you through on the Universal Tour.
There is a lacking element in this film that is hard to identify. The actors try their best to elevate the material and the special effects are very elaborate, but the movie fails to draw itself into actually believing it. It is what it is; we predict the key happenings in the narrative and we are correct. The answer to why the peculiar family behaves the way they do is given at the end, and there are no plot twists.
That family’s head, by the way, is a small, pale, fish-faced doctor, as Henry Gibson (the Oscar nominee from “Nashville”) has portrayed him.
I thought that he was far more intriguing to watch than the suburbanites we had been following, and in the last scenes of the movie, it dawned on me that his character was more captivating. Perhaps this is what the movie lacked: A humorous twist to subvert all of our predictions. What if all the typical suburbanites were actually malnourished nerds, and the new family that moved in looked the part of an all-American family: sinister? Just wondering.
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