I am on pace to watch well in excess of 300 movies this year, but I swear I can just never find the time to watch series or shows on television.

I know a popular consensus is that we live in a modern Golden Age of TV, but unless a show is something I’m inherently committed to, I just can’t find it in me to tune in. Series are a big commitment! They are something like eight to twelve one hour episodes, and you have to wait, like, two to three years between seasons, thereby having forgotten everything you last saw by the time a new season rolls around. It’s hard!

I watch X-Men ’97 because of course I do. I am a fan of some shows on Dropout like Gamechanger or Make Some Noise. And my wife makes me watch Survivor with her when there is a new season of that on. But aside from those? I’m Team Movies all day long. They are 90 to 120 minutes in most cases, in and out. Easy peasy.

Recently, there was a TV remake of The ‘Burbs starring Keke Palmer that looked interesting enough, but of course I never watched it. The wife did; I’ll have to ask her what she thought of it. I think Palmer is typically wonderful in things, so I hope it does/did well and lasts as long as the showrunners intend for it to go.

Having been partially inspired by seeing that show come out, I put the original The ‘Burbs on my watchlist a few weeks ago. I finally got around to checking it out yesterday. It’s a movie I vaguely recall having seen in theaters when I was eight or nine years old, but I couldn’t have told you anything about it other than that Tom Hanks’ character finds a human bone at one point. Weird that that is what stuck in my memory receptors.

Anyway, The ‘Burbs is about Ray Peterson (Hanks) as a suburbanite living a fairly innocuous life when a strange set of new neighbors, the Klopeks, move in next door to him. Ray starts hearing strange noises and seeing weird lights from the neighboring property, and he becomes more and more aware something unseemly may be going on.

Together with his neighborhood pals Art and Rumsfield–who are a little out-there themselves–Ray decides to do a little snooping and see if he can get to the bottom of the mysterious new residents.

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ The story is zany and madcap, and it pulls no punches in its absurdity. I liked the silliness of it all. It could have been more grounded in reality, and it could have gone in the opposite direction and have been making more of a statement about the mundanity of suburban life driving simple folks insane. But instead, it just went full asinine, and I appreciate that. Not every movie needs to be “about” something. Sometimes you just need weird European strangers probably murdering the hell out of your friends and neighbors.

It’s strange to think about this era when Tom Hanks was doing weird little movies like this or Big or Joe Versus The Volcano. Some were bigger hits than others, obviously, but it is wild to know he would pivot so hard in the coming years and take on more serious roles like Philadelphia or Apollo 13.  

+ Speaking of which, Tom Hanks is always an Up, and of course he is here, too. He plays a lot of different emotions and states in this one, from exasperated to in denial to desperate to defeated to joyous. In 1989, we knew he was talented, but there was no way to predict the decade he was about to have (as I alluded to in the first Up). That said, the talent was always there, and he commits every ounce of his potential to even a little romp of a film like this. 

I also enjoyed the cast around him, especially Bruce Dern and Rick Ducommun. I’m surprised the latter of which never caught on bigger than he did in this era. He’s a lot of fun as Ray’s buffoonish friend. He reads as a lesser John Candy.

– The Ricky character, played by Corey Feldman, is good enough for some chuckles because of his totally tubular 1980’s demeanor and attitude, but he is wildly unnecessary and extraneous to the plot. I kept waiting for him to get involved or be more active in the story, but the only thing he really does is lift up a blanket at the end, which any character could have done. I just wish he had mattered more to the story and didn’t feel as much like purely a laugh device. I guess that’s why he got the And credit in the opening, but still… this was near the end of his heyday! Do more-y with Corey!

– A minor Down to be sure, but there are some sound effects and sound mixing in this one that are a little outrageous. I get what I said in the Ups about the movie being absurd, but the sound effects used are a little too clown-ish even for me. They are small and not direly overused, but they occasionally took me out of the moments, and they made me wonder why they were used at all. I have never been someone for whom goofball sound effects really work, I guess, and they continue to not do anything for me here. I mean, hell, they even make Tom Hanks’ sneezes sound weird!

OVERALL

The ‘Burbs is a fun, zany, 1980’s style comedy with a strong lead and several worthwhile supporting roles around him. The story isn’t afraid to go a little off the rails and be a touch bizarre, which might have put off some audience members, but totally worked for me. All that said, it’s not a laugh riot or anything; it’s just a solidly decent time.