A Quiet Little Neighborhood, a Perfect Little Murder

I saw this movie years ago on TV with the title, Darling let's kill the neighbours. After watching it again recently, I found myself enjoying it just as much as the first time.

Terri Garr as Marsha is wonderful and carries this movie, Robert Urich as her husband Ross is great as the bewildered husband. The rest of the cast is great and you can see that everyone is having fun.

It's not a heavy film noir, it's a light hearted mystery that doesn't tax the brain cells and is very entertaining.

While the story can be a little implausible at times, it's still fun and does have you guessing who is doing what to who.

One thing that I liked though, and this is just a small thing, I loved the way that the baby was in most of the scenes and didn't 'disappear' when the leads were involved in the action. It added a small realism to the movie.

This is a funny little made-for-tv movie about how the suburban life can get to you. Marcia (Garr) and her husband (Urich) just moved to a new housing development in California and promised themselves (made to look like stereotypical radicals) they would not succumb to the rituals of lawn mowing and fence-talking. But, when Marcia's new baby monitor starts picking up conversations between a mysterious "Don" and "Judy" leading to a murder plot, she becomes the towns new detective. However, as the conversations between "Don" and "Judy" become more frequent, and the plot starts to thicken, we come to doubt the seriousness of the events, it seems more like a soap drama than a reality. And likewise, as Marcia, careful not to let on what she suspects of her neighbors, she unwittingly causes other gossip and secrets to unfold about the residents of the small suburban housing development.

It's got some good moments, particularly between Marcia and the Detectice (Rocco) to which she constantly reports her skeptical findings, although the story does tend to get a little too ridiculous (though that is the point--afterall it is in a way making fun of soap opera like happenings). Anyways, I particularly recommend it if you like Terri Garr (as she is in her usual "Garr" style here). It's like "Rear Window" gone overboard.

There are very few TV movies that are comedies. This is one, and, while trite, it was enjoyable and good, distracting entertainment.

Teri Garr fans will especially like it, as she is at the top of her form here as a young mom who overhears some strange doings on the baby monitor and sets out to investigate. The late Robert Urich is her husband and Alex Rocco is the hapless police detective. Garr gets good support from Susan Ruttan and Jeffrey Tambor as well.

For some reason, networks are loathe to produce comedies as TV movies. Once in a while, it's nice to see something that isn't a true life crime story or a gory murder. Although this TV movie is rather silly, it was still fun.

Projected as a "dark" comedy, one that calls for an adroitly composed scenario, this film instead receives its principal assistance from performances by the two leads, not nearly enough to offset a script that is full of holes in logic, and consistently routine, at best, direction that disregards opportunities for developing effective sequences of satire. A highly implausible and indifferently presented storyline has Ross (Robert Urich) and Marsha (Teri Garr) Pegler, urban social activists being forced by economic factors, largely related to an infant daughter, to move away from their metropolitan area and off into a suburb, there becoming owners of a cookie-cutter home within a bland housing tract, while yet resolute in their stand against the enticements of conformity, depicted here by such as welcome mats, PTA meetings, barbecue grills, and the like. Ross brings home an intercom in the guise of a clown's face as a method for keeping tabs upon their baby from various parts of their house, and soon after Marsha is startled when the device somehow intercepts a racy conversation from what is apparently a nearby cordless telephone, she thereby overhearing that the voices belong to an obviously adulterous couple, Don and Judy, who are plotting to murder one of their spouses. Marsha's bent toward involvement with social issues causes her to make an attempt at identifying the would-be killers and, hopefully, stopping them before they complete the act, all this without having a clue other than their first names, but when she tackles the investigative process she discovers that her new neighbourhood holds an incommodious surfeit of Dons and Judys. When a police detective is unsurprisingly reticent to involve his department with what he believes is Marsha's overactive imagination, she decides to become acquainted with a number of potential victims as well as suspects, thereby raising mild havoc among her neighbours, while additionally placing her marriage in jeopardy because of her interminable search for clues. Some elements of the plot are hopelessly improbable and flaccid direction by Williams cancels any hoped-for effect from presumed red herrings while Urich, and Garr who essentially directs herself, must bolster their parts with mugging. Potentially satiric aspects in the narrative, such as Marsha's increasing fondness for television soap opera, are occasionally depicted well, but the screenplay declines into a boring farrago for a film that is completely lacking in suspense, while being as well a waste of good acting talent, including that of supporting players. Originally shown as a television "movie of the week", the film was immediately thereafter released for video rental distribution based upon the popularity of the co-leads. There is no design for a DVD version.

A sweet little film for spoof buffs, baby lovers and suckers for the ever amiable Teri Garr, especially soothing when you've just returned home from having The X-Files movie keeping your hairs on end for all but two hours.