Guilty Horror Pleasure #87: The ‘Burbs (dir by Joe Dante)

Posted on October 20, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

1989’s The ‘Burbs takes place in …. well, it’s right there in the title.

Welcome to the suburbs! It’s place with big houses, green lawns, and neighbors who often don’t have much to do other than watch each other and gossip. Ray Peterson (Tom Hanks) lives with his wife, Carol (Carrie Fisher), and is friends with Art Weingartner (Rick Ducommun) and Mark Rumsfield (Bruce Dern). Ricky Butler (Corey Feldman) is the local teenager. It’s a nice neighborhood …. at least, until the Klopeks move in.

The Klopeks are viewed with suspicion from the minute they show up. They’re from a different country, they always seem to be burying something in their backyard, and Dr. Werner Klopek (Henry Gibson) is oddly stand-offish. When Walter Seznick (Gale Gordon) disappears and the the Klopeks are seen around Walter’s house and with Walter’s dog, Ray and his friends start to suspect that their new neighbors might be ritualistic murderers!

Oh, how I love The ‘Burbs. The film’s portrait of the suburbs as being a hotbed of paranoia may be a familiar one but it doesn’t matter when you’ve got actors like Tom Hanks and Bruce Dern throwing themselves into their roles. As always, Hanks is the glue that holds the film and its disparate parts together, giving a likable performance as a man who goes from being the voice of reason to being convinced that his neighbors are cannibals. Bruce Dern gleefully sends up his own image as a paranoid Vietnam vet but there’s also a sweetness to Dern’s performance that really makes it stand out. Dern’s character might be a little crazy but he does truly care about his neighbors.

Just as he did with Piranha and The Howling, Dante balances humor with suspense. He does such a good job of telling the story and getting good performances from his cast, that even the film’s big twist works far better than one might expect. It’s an 80s film so, of course, a few things explode towards the end of it. The film’s character-based humor is replaced with some broader jokes but no matter. The Burbs is an entertaining trip to the heart of suburban paranoia.

As the saying goes, just because you’re paranoid, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t out to get you.

Previous Guilty Pleasures

Final Voyage (1999, directed by Jim Wynorski)

Posted on May 27, 2025 by Jedadiah Leland

Aaron (Dylan Walsh) has been hired to sever as a bodyguard for spoiled heiress Gloria (Erika Eleniak) while she takes a cruise. Things go wrong when Josef (Ice-T) and Max (Claudia Christian) hijack the cruise. They think that they’ll make a fortune by taking everyone hostage and searching the boat. Little do they know that the boat is very slowly sinking. (They would known except they killed the engineers when they first took over.) Aaron and Gloria have to defeat the terrorists before the boat sinks.

Imagine Die Hard or Under Siege made not with expensive special effects but instead with a healthy supply of stock footage and built not around proven action stars like Bruce Willis and Steven Seagal but instead around the charisma-free Dylan Walsh and you have a pretty good idea why Final Voyage is one of the more forgettable movies to be ripped off from either one of those two films. At least Dylan Walsh has the excuse of being miscast. Erika Eleniak actually was in Under Siege and still seems clueless as to what she’s supposed to be doing during Final Voyage. Ice-T is an amusing villain and the movie opens with a gunfight on an airplane that is so poorly choreographed and improbable that it becomes entertaining to watch. Otherwise, Final Voyage is a cruise best not taken.

This is a Jim Wynorski film so there’s plenty of gratuitous bra and cleavage shots for those who are specifically looking for that. Jim Wynorski definitely has a style and he manages to bring it to every film that he makes, even when it doesn’t really make sense for the story being told. Give Wynorski this, he understands why people are watching his movies.

Film Review: Groundhog Day (dir by Harold Ramis)

Posted on February 2, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Happy Groundhog Day! For the record, Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow today so get ready for six more weeks of winter!

Oh, how I love Groundhog Day. I really do. It’s perhaps the silliest holiday that we have in America and I absolutely adore the whole thing. I love the fact that people get dressed up for it. I love that there are people who plan their entire weekend around seeing what the groundhog predicts. I love that we all know there’s no way a groundhog can reasonably predict the weather but, for one day, we pretend like it can. And while Groundhog Day itself had its beginning in Germany, the holiday really has become pure Americana. It’s such an innocent holiday, or at least it is now that Bill de Blasio is no longer in a position to kill the magic groundhog.

(Boo de Blasio! Boo!)

Of course, no Groundhog Day is complete without watching the 1993 comedy of the same name. The film has become such a major part of American culture that even people who haven’t watched it know what it’s about. (It’s a bit like It’s A Wonderful Life in that way.) Bill Murray plays Phil Connors, a cynical weatherman who is sent to cover Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney and finds himself reliving the same day over and over again. Every morning, it’s once again February 2nd. Sonny and Cher’s I Got You Babe plays on the radio. Phil is approached by Ned Ryerson (Stephen Tobolowsky), an annoying former classmate turned insurance salesman. Phil steps in the same puddle. He finds himself covering the same story and, again and again, he’s stranded by the same blizzard. At first, Phil is angry. Even multiple suicides can’t stop the cycle. Kidnapping the groundhog can’t stop the cycle. Then, he decides to take advantage of living the same day over and over again. He gets to know the people in the town and realizes that they’re not so bad. He saves the mayor (Brian Doyle-Murray) from choking at dinner but, in the film’s most poignant moment, realizes that an old homeless man is going to die regardless of how many times he tries to save him. Phil learns how to learn the piano. He learns how to speak French. And, most importantly, he falls in love with Rita (Andie MacDowell). Of course, when he tells Rita this, she assumes he’s just trying to take advantage of her. Rita says that they barely know each other but what she doesn’t realize is that Phil has been spending day-after-day with her.

As you might have guessed I relate to Rita. She loves the silliness of the holiday and so do I. I also relate to Nancy Taylor (Marita Geraghty), just because of her determination to enjoy the day no matter what. That said, this is totally Bill Murray’s film and this is one of his best performances, one in which he expertly mixes his trademark comedy with some very poignant drama. One thing I like about this film is that Phil becomes a better man as a result of living the same day over and over again but it doesn’t totally change his personality. At the end, he’s still the same sarcastic smartass that he was at the start of the film but he’s no longer a cynic. He’s learned how to appreciate other people. He’s fallen in love. Much like George Bailey, he’s become the richest man in town. This is a rare film where the main character is as interesting after he’s reformed as before.

It always breaks my heart a little to read that Bill Murray and director Harold Ramis had a difficult time working together while making this film. It’s truly a perfect film and that’s due to both Murray’s performance and Ramis’s heartfelt direction. I’m also glad that Ramis and Murray made up before Ramis passed away. Life’s too short and sadly, unlike in the movies, we don’t always get a chance to go back and correct the past.

Groundhog Day is a holiday classic and may it continue to be watched for decades to come.

Spaceballs (1987, directed by Mel Brooks)

Posted on May 4, 2024 by Jedadiah Leland

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A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away…

President Skroob (Mel Brooks), the evil and incompetent leader of Planet Spaceball, has squandered all of the air on his planet and is planning on stealing the atmosphere of the planet Druida. To pull this off, he arranges for the idiotic Prince Valium (Jim J. Bullock) to marry Vespa (Daphne Zuniga), the princess of Druida. (All together now: “She doesn’t look Druish.”) Vespa and her droid, Dot Matrix (voice by Joan Rivers), flee Druida with Lord Dark Helmet (Rick Moranis) and Colonel Sandurz (George Wyner) in pursuit.

In debt to the intergalactic gangster, Pizza the Hut (voiced by Dom DeLuise), a mercenary named Lone Star (Bill Pullman) and his associate, the man-dog hypbrid Barf (John Candy), accept a contract from Vespa’s father (Dick Van Patten) to track down his daughter. They take off in their space Winnebago to bring Vespa home. Though they start only interested in money, Lone Star and Barf come to learn about love, freedom, and a mystical power known as the Schwartz. (“No, the Schwartz!”)

Back when I was growing up and just being able to have HBO made you the coolest guy on the block, Spaceballs was one of my favorite movies. I watched it every time that it came on cable. As usual with Mel Brooks, there were a lot of double entendres that went over my young head but there was also enough goofy humor that I could laugh at what was going on. I could quote all the lines. I laughed whenever Rick Moranis showed up in his Darth Vader-costume. I laughed at John Candy’s facial expressions. I laughed when Mel Brooks showed up as Yogurt, the Spaceballs version of Yoda. Pizza the Hut? That’s hilarious when you’re a kid!

I recently rewatched the film. Revisiting it was a lesson in how your memory can trick you. I could still quote most of the lines with reasonable accuracy but nothing was quite the way I remembered it. Rick Moranis and John Candy were still hilarious and, being older, I could better appreciated the frustration felt by George Wyner’s Colonel Sandurz. I also realized what a good performance Bill Pullman gave as Lone Star. While everyone else mugged for the camera, Pullman played his role straight.

I also discovered that a lot of the scenes that I remembered as being hilarious were actually just mildly amusing. Mel Brooks was always hit-and-miss as a director, the type who would toss everything and the kitchen sink into his films. Spaceballs has a lot of hilarious scenes but it’s obvious that Brooks didn’t have the same affection for the source material as he did with Young Frankenstein or Blazing Saddles or even High Anxiety. Brooks is poking fun at Star Wars because it’s popular but he doesn’t seem to have any strong feelings, one way or the other, about George Lucas’s space epic.

I still laughed, though. Even if Spaceballs wasn’t the masterpiece that I remembered it being, I still enjoyed rewatching it. The jokes that hit were funny enough to make up for the ones that missed. Even with his weaker films, Mel Brooks is a national treasure.

A Movie A Day #294: Ghost In the Machine (1993, directed by Rachel Talaly)

Posted on October 29, 2017 by Jedadiah Leland

Karl (Ted Marcoux) is a serial killer who works in an electronics store and who steals address books and uses them to pick his victims. His latest stolen address book belongs to Terry (Karen Allen). Before Karl can start killing Terry’s family and friends, he is killed in a car accident. Because there is a lightning storm going on at the same time, the dead Karl is able to transfer his evil soul into the electrical grid. Traveling from appliance to appliance, Karl starts to kill all of Terry’s friends and co-workers. A microwave oven. A hand dryer. A dishwasher. If it is electrical, Karl can use it to kill. Fortunately, Terry knows a legendary hacker (Chris Mulkey) who can help her fight back.

Like Prison, Destroyer, and The Horror Show, Ghost in the Machine is another dumb movie about a psycho who gets his soul transformed into electricity. Ghost In The Machine was also obviously influenced by The Lawnmower Man and the entire movie is full of early 90s paranoia about the internet and computers in general. Rachel Talaly, who got her start with the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise and who has recently directed some of the best received episodes of Doctor Who, does a good job with the deaths but cannot do anything with the lousy script and unlikable characters. Nearly everyone who dies is killed because they know Terry but that never seems to bother her.

I think every 90s kid, or at least every 90s male, watched Ghost In The Machine on HBO and had a crush on Shevonne Durkin.