Bad Neighbors

By RICHARD CORLISS

THE 'BURBS Directed by Joe Dante

Screenplay by Dana Olsen

Here it is, folks: the movie that hates its own audience. In mall-town America, a modest queue forms at the local Googolplex to see a new comedy starring Tom Hanks, exemplary nice guy. This time, the overgrown kid from Big is playing Ray Peterson, an amiable businessman whose idea of an O.K. vacation is to hang around his pleasant home in numbingly normal Hinckley Hills and be lazy. Let his wife (Carrie Fisher) and son go to their lakeside cottage; he'll just veg out, watch TV and keep an eye on those . . . well, darned odd neighbors who recently moved next door. These people talk funny; they don't socialize; they probably smell bad. So Ray and his friends will just, oh, break into the new family's house, dig up the backyard, wreck the basement and leave the place in cinders. They'll destroy the neighborhood in order to save it.

What's got into moviemakers lately, that they are so enthusiastically trashing their most genteel patrons? Bob Balaban's recent comedy Parents, a kind of robin's-egg Blue Velvet, limned a '50s family, as placid and telegenic as the Andersons on Father Knows Best, that devours human flesh. Now Middle America gets a return visit from Joe Dante, guerrilla terrorist in Spielbergian suburbia. His Gremlins was a comic nightmare in which midget monsters invade a wonderful-life town and act up like the Hell's Angels in a malt shop. In The 'Burbs, the gremlins are the townspeople themselves, driven to posse paranoia by their suspicions about people whose only sin may be eccentricity. It's sort of a lynch-mob movie for laughs -- laughs that are meant to catch in the back of your throat, like movie-house popcorn that turns out to be all kernels. One of the new neighbors is described as "about a nine on the tension scale." And so is this smart, crafty, off-putting movie.

Well, satire was never meant to ingratiate, and The 'Burbs is unsparing in its cauterizing of provincialism. One neighbor (played by Bruce Dern with wonderfully psychotic poise and a barbed-wire halo of gray hair) responds to every real or imagined threat to his property values as if he were commanding a platoon in Nam -- with trusty telescope, walkie-talkie and a K ration of animal crackers. Another friend (Rick Ducommun) is your basic bully-wimp who goads Ray into all manner of illicit snooping. And Ray is the mild soul caught in the middle; with no special convictions, he mutates from a slightly curious homeowner to a horribly singed home wrecker. Hanks throws himself into this antiaudience movie with such suave energy that he seems determined to torpedo his hard-won rep as Hollywood's most comfortable new star.

Dante, a gifted parodist, adds spice to the gruel with glancing references to vintage cartoons, Sergio Leone movies and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. His sight gags can be as nimble as a house number that, when budged, somersaults from a nine to a six, revealing the new neighbors' address as 666, the sign of the Antichrist. But like many a Hollywood Voltaire, Dante wants his Candide candied. This is satire that hedges its bets. By the end, Ray and his friends must be heroes as well as oafs; the new neighbors must be villains as well as victims. All of them are "neighbors from hell," but the old residents are revealed to have done the right thing, if for the wrong reasons. And so Dante, like the viewer, is left straddling a white picket fence, perched between admiration and an urge to move out of this neighborhood pretty darned quick.