Synopsis
When secretive new neighbors move in next door, suburbanite Ray Peterson and his friends let their paranoia get the best of them as they start to suspect the newcomers of evildoings and commence an investigation. But it's hardly how Ray, who much prefers drinking beer, reading his newspaper and watching a ball game on the tube expected to spend his vacation.
Your Movie Library
Cast
- Tom HanksRay Peterson
- Bruce DernLt. Mark Rumsfield
- Carrie FisherCarol Peterson
- Rick DucommunArt Weingartner
- Wendy SchaalBonnie Rumsfield
- Corey FeldmanRicky Butler
- Courtney GainsHans Klopek
- Henry GibsonDr. Werner Klopek
- Gale GordonWalter Seznick
- Dick MillerVic, Garbageman #1
Recommendations
- 88
Chicago Tribune
Though The burbs is hardly an actor's film, Hanks continues to demonstrate the ease and maturity that has been his since Big, while Dern, Ducommun and Feldman lend broad but effective support. - 80
Empire
One of Tom Hanks' overlooked performances because this bizarre thriller-comedy ends so strangely but there's much to like here. - 80
CineVue
Skillfully mixing elements of horror while never alienating its core PG demographic, The 'Burbs also benefits from a wonderfully playful score by the late great Jerry Goldsmith. While the film bottles it slightly at the end with the obvious, neatly-tied-together resolution which would have benefited from maintaining an ambiguity, the enormous sense of fun established by Dante and his cast in the run-up more than makes up for any shortcomings. - 75
TV Guide Magazine
The 'Burbs offers a delightfully complicated portrait of suburban voyeurism, a portrait taken to its absurd extreme by Dante's introduction of foreign elements among his xenophobic characters, in a devastating satire of suburban values. - 70
Variety
Director Joe Dante funnels his decidedly cracked view of suburban life through dark humour in The ‘Burbs. Hanks does a fine impersonation of a regular guy on the verge of a nervous breakdown, while Dern adds another memorable psychotic to his resume. - 60
Time Out London
It's very silly, of course, but Hanks' fine timing is matched by a strong supporting cast, and thanks to Dante's wicked, comic-strip view of the world, the movie achieves an admirably wacky consistency as it debunks American mores and movie clichés, from Hitchcock and Leone to Michael Winner and Tobe Hooper. - 60
Chicago Reader
This isn't a major Dante effort, but his ability to make a good-natured satire that allows an audience to read it several ways at once is as strong as ever, and many of the sidelong genre notations are especially funny. - 50
Chicago Sun-Times
The 'Burbs tries to position itself somewhere between Beetlejuice and The Twilight Zone, but it lacks the dementia of the first and the wicked intelligence of the second and turns instead into a long shaggy dog story.
