Joe Dante is good with these studio backlot suburban dream worlds. He embraces how fake they look. Dante is not into reality; he makes movies. The backdrops are allowed to be too tidy and too perfect. It makes the ideal setting for everything to go completely to shit. Dante is the perfect age to have seen The Blob at the Saturday matinee way back and he learned all the right lessons from it. He applied them to Gremlins and he applies them to The ‘Burbs, the story of a bunch of bored busy bodies—all out-of-shape married men—who’ve decided that the not-very-social, strangely pale, totally creepy and foreign new neighbors on the block must be hiding sinister secrets. Their efforts to get to the bottom of this result in raw slip-and-fall slapstick (this film’s three stooges: Tom Hanks, Rick Ducommun and Bruce Dern) and the literally explosive climax that you could always count on in the 1980s, along with the big orchestral score. This isn’t a great movie, but it’s entertaining. It’s a black comedy, with death and destruction, aimed at families. I’m all for that.