Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on The New Portable.
There’s a certain mindset needed to pull off horror-comedy well. This is something I have railed about in the past. Most filmmakers, when faced with the challenge of a film that combines elements of both comedy and horror will side much more on the comedy side instead of the horror side. Even the ones that are well done--Shaun of the Dead, Slither, Dead Alive and a host of others are far more likely to lean harder on the comedy than the horror. What horror we get will often be of the gross-out variety because, well, it’s easy to blend that with comedy. In the case of The ‘Burbs, we’re not getting a great deal of horror and, honestly, not a great deal of comedy.
What I mean by that in this case is not that this is a Scary Movie-style spoof, but that it is very much a movie comedy before it is anything like the thriller it is pretending to be. Specifically, that means that The ‘Burbs is going to be filled with the sorts of characters that exist only in comedy movies. I might even go so far as to say that the characters here are specific to comedy films of the 1980s.
