When I was in the fifth grade, I went to visit my cousins in Atlanta for a week. I only saw my cousins once a year in the Poconos, so, it was cool to hang out with them for a longer amount of time. They were big movie goers and their talent for recalling movie lines – particularly my cousin Jimmy’s – was prodigious. It was on this trip that I saw The ‘Burbs.

The movie theater was packed. Every joke hit. I laughed hard. So did everyone in the audience. I thought it was one of the best movies I’d ever seen. Probably because I was twelve.

The ‘Burbs was a bomb and I think has been pretty much forgotten by modern audiences.

Director Joe Dante was coming off of hits like Gremlins and Innerspace (I think Innerspace was a hit?) so perhaps it was a failure by comparison. All I know is that I really loved it.

Staying home on the night before New Year’s Eve, I browsed through the free Amazon Prime movies and saw that The ‘Burbs was there, so, I turned it on.

It features a pre-Philadelphia, post-Bachelor Party Tom Hanks as a regular suburban family man who has some peculiar, secretive neighbors, the Klopeks. No one in the neighborhood can figure them out, but there are rumors. Strange noises come from their home at night. Pretty soon Ray (Hanks), Art (stand-up Rick Ducommon), and Rumsfield (Bruce Dern) hatch a plan to catch the Klopeks for murdering their neighbor Walter.

It sounds dark but it isn’t, it’s all pretty tongue in cheek.

In the opening of the movie, we’re introduced to all of the characters. Walter on his front lawn calling his poodle Queenie, Rumsfield coming outside to raise and then salute the American flag with his trophy wife, neighborhood punk kid Ricky turning up the stereo on his porch. We watch them and we watch them watch each other, observing but more likely creating their own drama. Paranoia is a big theme.

I don’t know much about subtext in movies but there’s an artificial quality to the location. The suburban street is clearly a set on a lot somewhere in Hollywood, the kind from Leave it to Beaver or Father Knows Best. And Walter is played by Gale Gordon who was featured on one of those very sitcoms Dennis the Menace. Pretty but fake is a trite commentary on the suburbs but that doesn’t mean it’s not accurate.

Ricky, incidentally, was played by Corey Feldman whom I loved from Goonies and License to Drive and – I’ll admit it – Dream a Little Dream. Most of the laughs that I remember came from him and the friends he gathers to watch the insanity of the adults in his neighborhood. They all sit on his porch applauding and waiting for the pizza dude. No joke. “Pizza dude” made me crack up. It was either because I was twelve or because of the atmosphere, either way, you had to be there.

Having finished watching it, does it hold up? I think so but probably only for me. I’ve noticed this about certain movies. I have a friend who said that he didn’t like Goonies. This blew my mind. He’s my age. How could he not like Goonies?

It’s because he didn’t see it until he was an adult. He missed his window.

So it is with The ‘Burbs. If you didn’t watch it when you were a kid in an audience who also loved it, it’s not going to do it for you in 2018.

This is one of my favorite things about pop culture, though, these little pockets of fandom, the ones that people rarely mention. When Penny Marshall died, people posted on social media about Laverne and Shirley and A League of Their Own and Awakenings. But one friend posted about Jumpin’ Jack Flash, another movie directed by her and a personal favorite as noted in my On Watching Stuff Over and Over and Over post. I was also surprised at how many people responded to my Stealing Home post, mostly with, “Hey, what do you mean ‘crappy’?” And if it weren’t for this kind of favorite movie, we would never have gotten the Gremlins 2 sketch from Key and Peele (Joe Dante directed that sequel as well).

The ‘Burbs belongs in this canon of personal favorites.

Eh, go ahead and watch it. It’s Tom Hanks! Carrie Fisher’s in it too! If it’s only mediocre what have you really lost? Let me know what you think.