BEFORE: This may seem like a big leap, from a sci-fi franchise film to a strange little comedy from 1989 - but Carrie Fisher's in this one, too, and this is certainly the last movie she'll be in this year, and since I've worked my way through her filmography, perhaps this is the last film I'll see her in. What a damn shame. I thought I taped this film around the same time as I got "Bright Lights", but it must have been after I watched "The Bonfire of the Vanities", or I would have linked here from Tom Hanks, right? Anyway, it's my link to Tom Hanks, whose films are going to help me finish out Year 9. I should be writing more Christmas cards tonight, but I'm anxious to get to the end of the year. I could save the last three films to watch between Christmas and New Year's, but I think I'm going to need that time to write my year-end review and also figure out my starting point for Movie Year 10. (That usually means figuring out the February schedule of romance films, and then counting backwards 30 or 31 linked films from there.)
THE PLOT: An overstressed suburbanite and his fellow neighbors are convinced that the new family on the block is part of a murderous Satanic cult.
AFTER: This is a strange little film, because for the longest time it doesn't seem to know what it wants to be - is it a horror film where the weird neighbors really are up to something evil or creepy, or is it a slapstick comedy where the right-thinking neighbors keep having accidents while they try to get close enough to find out? Bad news, it's both of those things, and you really can't mix genres like that, it's like putting chocolate sauce on an onion. And after Tom Hanks and his cohorts keep screwing up worse and worse, it's painful by the end to see them go for broke, when it's still possible that their imaginations have been getting the best of them, and the family in question is not evil, just very weird.
What's worse is that under the guise of pulling back the curtain to show how weird and twisted life can be in the American suburbs, it sort of justifies anti-immigrant sentiment at the same time. What are those people, Slavic? Their name sounds German or Polish or something, and you know what THAT means... And if that makes it OK to break into their house, or spy on them and violate their privacy, that's not a good thing. Jeez, why didn't they just look for some information about the weird neighbors on the internet. Oh, right, it was 1989 and they couldn't do that.
We really are spoiled these days, because if I had a strange neighbor, Googling them would be the first thing I would do, or I'd look for their Facebook pages and play amateur detective with their family photos. I used to do some freelance genealogy work for a family friend of my first wife, basically if someone in the Cleveland area had a relative who died in New York City, I'd go to the surrogate court in the appropriate NYC borough and Xerox their will that was on file, which would reveal a lot of information about their relatives. That's how I earned pocket money for a few years in the early 1990's, but I'm betting all that stuff's on the internet by now, if you know how to look for it.
An odd thing about this film is that, according to the IMDB, it was filmed during a writers' strike in 1988, so that does explain a lot about why many of the dialogue scenes feel improvised, because they were. There are a few times where two actors are going back-and-forth on an issue, but the arguments don't always appear coherent, they drift off into random directions at times.
The whole thing's set on a cul-de-sac, in a town that's supposedly somewhere in Iowa, or perhaps Illinois. But of course it was really shot on the Universal Studios back-lot, a set called Colonial Street, that's been used in many different movies and TV shows, at least as far back as "The Munsters", and then later it became Wisteria Lane on "Desperate Housewives". You can also see this collection of fake houses in the exterior shots on the TV shows "Leave It to Beaver", "Marcus Welby, M.D.", "Providence" and the movies "Harvey", "Gremlins" and "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas". Hollywood's been recycling since way before it was cool.
Also starring Tom Hanks (last seen in "The Bonfire of the Vanities"), Bruce Dern (last seen in "The Hateful Eight"), Rick Ducommun (last seen in "Gremlins 2: The New Batch"), Wendy Schaal, Corey Feldman (last seen in "Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope"), Henry Gibson (last seen in "Nashville"), Brother Theodore, Courtney Gains, Gale Gordon, Robert Picardo (last seen in "Hail, Caesar!"), Dick Miller (also last seen in "Gremlins 2"), Cory Danziger, Franklyn Ajaye, Rance Howard (last seen in "Nebraska"), Nicky Katt (last seen in "Boiler Room").
RATING: 4 out of 10 delivered pizzas
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