Jacob's 31 Days of Halloween - Day 18: The 'Burbs
Other than Big, I'm really not familiar with Tom Hanks' early comedic work from before he became America's nice dad. I've also only seen two other Joe Dante films (Gremlins and Small Soldiers), so this combination of ignorances provided me with the perfect excuse to watch The 'Burbs.
This is a fun little Halloween comedy about nosy suburbanites becoming terrified that the new neighbors are a satanic cult. I say it's "fun" because while it is undoubtedly a comedy, there's not really any jokes. There's a comedic tone to the whole thing, with plenty of cartoony hijinks and a comical musical score by Jerry Goldsmith, but there aren't really any punchlines to the silly setups. It has the tone of a live action cartoon (probably because Joe Dante is essentially an animation historian), but it's a fairly cheap cartoon.
Although this is a year after Big, Tom Hanks really doesn't do much performance-wise in this movie until the very end (his breakdown is my favorite part of the whole movie, but then it's sort of undermined by a "twist"). Bruce Dern plays a strange ex-military character as well as he can, and poor Carrie Fisher is given an incredibly boring housewife role despite proving her comedic chops in films like The Blues Brothers 9 years before.
There's plenty of fun set design and bizarre sequences to make the movie worth watching, but as a whole it's not very strong. If you're looking for great horror-comedies, this one can wait for a bit.
No comments:
Post a Comment