The 'Burbs (1989)

Joe Dante's The 'Burbs arrives from 1989 with a premise that has aged into something close to documentary. Tom Hanks plays Ray Peterson, a man on vacation who spends his week squinting at the reclusive Klopeks next door and imagining ritual sacrifice. The film is a dark comedy about suburban paranoia, and it is content to let that paranoia be the joke. The neighborhood is a cul-de-sac of lawnmowers and casseroles, rendered in a single shade of beige, and Dante directs it with the cheerful cruelty of a man who has clearly lived on such a street.

The cultural inventory here is thin, and the film's own concerns lie elsewhere. Race never enters the frame; the detectives who appear briefly register as faces and not as commentary on anything. LGBTQ+ lives are absent entirely, and the marriages on display are strictly conventional. Carrie Fisher's Carol supplies the reasonable voice that pushes back against the men's escalating nonsense, though this reads as standard spouse friction in a sitcom register, not an argument about anything larger. Environmental themes do not exist, and the garbage truck is a prop for the search for human remains. Body diversity is not on the agenda, and the Klopeks are marked as sinister by their pallor and their refusal to mow. Mark Rumsfield's veteran paranoia is a punchline, not a portrait. The satire that does exist aims at conformity and the news cycle, and it never turns its attention to money or class.

The film's one brush with moral instruction comes late, when Ray delivers a tirade declaring that he and his neighbors have been the lunatics all along. It is a fine speech. Then the basement yields a skull, the Klopeks turn out to be exactly the murderers everyone suspected, and the sermon collapses under its own punchline. Art gets his soundbite about suburbanites taking on criminals. The picture is a cult classic now, fondly remembered, and it remains a comedy about nothing more urgent than a man who should have gone to the beach. We grade it accordingly.