Retro Rewatch – The Burbs 1989

Retro Rewatch is an ongoing editorial that takes a look into certain films, conventions, crazes, and characters of the horror genre years after their heyday. It is an effort to try and put the magnifying glass up to the horror world with the much needed luxuries of time and perspective applied in order to fully understand the impact and social significance of these projects/themes/ideas (if any). So for this installment of Retro Rewatch, I give you one of my all time favorite horror comedies ever with The Burbs.

Before I even begin to get into it, I know a lot of the community is going to jump all over me because technically, The Burbs is much more of a comedy than it is a horror movie and to that I emphatically say Nay!  Well, yes there are a lot more moments or comedy rather than horror, and yes Tom Hanks is in it (at the time, he was an established comedic actor, not the drama Oscar grabbing actor you know today).  The only kind of comedy you are going to find here is the overwhelming and rarely correctly utilized Dark comedy, which as we all know from Gremlins, director Joe Dante can pull off in spades.

Early in the film, we get introduced to a few of our main characters as well as the picturesque suburbanite neighborhood on Mayfield Place.  Everyone seems to get along on the surface of their friendly neighbor interactions, but what we don’t know yet is that alliances have already been formed and damning societal incidents and actions have already taken place.  For the moment though, that isn’t important when we get our first look at our main character Ray (Tom Hanks).  Ray is enjoying the start of a week of vacation in which he plans to sit around the house doing as little as possible.  In these opening moments of the film, we get introduced to the neighborhood goofball Art (Rick Ducommun), the militant Rumsfield (Bruce Dern), and the neighborhood meatball Ricky (Corey Feldman). 

The story gets rolling when our main characters get together to talk about their new neighbors The Klopeks who have moved in next door to Ray a few months ago and don’t seem to be interested in any kind of home maintenance.  If there ever was a set up for something wrong with the new neighbors, The Burbs perfectly embodies it almost to the point of parody.  I mean, what else are the neighbors supposed to think?  The house hasn’t been worked on in years with very obvious signs of age including horribly decaying siding all the way up to a nonfunctioning ancient doorbell.  The grass is all dead and the bushes seem to somehow be wasting away (despite as we all know, the resilience of hedges).   All of this is a stark contrast to the rest of the beautiful homes on Mayfield Place that make it look exactly like the set of Desperate Housewives (Which it actually is.  Seriously, it’s the same Paramount back lot and had been used in a lot of different films and TV shows).

This is where things get interesting; the very secluded Klopek family doesn’t ever make appearances outside of their home which just adds more fuel to the fire.  The neighbors become wary as they play off one another building up suspense and paranoia that is much like the classic Twilight Zone episode “The Monsters on Maple Street”.  Like a good Hitchcockian nod, paranoia and fear are the biggest thematically and story driving elements.  When an old man in the neighborhood goes missing without a word from anyone, the main characters break into his home and investigate his disappearance.  This eventually escalates to the attempted exhumation of human remains in the Klopek basement as well as attempts to dig out their back yard on a day when the Klopeks leave their home.

What’s brilliant about the horror in the film is that it’s displayed through the minds of the supposed protagonists.  While Ray’s head is swimming with the new information about the neighbors, he draws the most insane conclusions in his own mind.  A quick channel surfing session shows clips from the Exorcist, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre II, and Race with the Devil which coincides with one of the most ridiculous and darkly humors dream sequences ever caught on film.  Joe Dante knows that he is making a comedy, but he is also crafting the audience into believing that maybe, just maybe that Ray’s insane moments of thought about his neighbors are actually justified. 

There are a number of reasons why I love The Burbs, but the main reason is this use of horror in the story itself.  The film uses horror movie clichés, especially those from classic Satan worshipping films to invoke a little bit of scare into the viewer and to help fuel the insane antics of the protagonists.  We laugh at the moments of comedy because we are along for the ride to see these characters acting paranoid, crazy, and irrational with just the slightest motivation.  It’s an ever building snowball rolling down a hill of misplaced logic that leads to the inevitable conclusion that the Klopeks are Satanists who kill and bury people.  Mix that in with three men who are entirely unfit to get the job done and you have a formula that not only pays homage to classic paranoia films and thrillers of a past era, but uses their conventions to convey a sense of misplaced dread that could only lie in the heads of people who have seen a few too many horror films.

I love The Burbs and I think that everyone should check it out at least once in their life.  I realize that it isn’t one of the best horror movies ever made, but I don’t care because I easily fell in love with the way the story was delivered to me as well as the zany antics of a perfectly casted group of people.  If you are a fan of horror comedies, give this one a shot, you may just love it like I do.

Is it a cult classic, a fitting analysis, or complete forgettable?:  As far as I’m concerned, it’s a cult classic that few too many people have seen.  They regal Joe Dante for Piranha, Gremlins, or the Howling and forget this gem of a film.  But if you don’t buy that logic, at least we got a pretty good analysis out of it.