There Goes the Neighborhood

Stars: Jeff Daniels (Arachnophobia, The Butcher's Wife, Terms of Endearment), Catherine O'Hara (Home Alone, Beetlejuice). After a brief and unexciting theatrical run in Phoenix, this lame comedy is heading for neighborhood video outlets. Jeff Daniels stars as Willis Embry, a prison psychologist who's told by a dying convict about an $8.5 million dollar fortune buried under an unsuspecting suburbanite's basement foundation. In the adjoining cell, a trio of cons overhears the confession--all except for the last digit of the street address--and break out, hot on Embry's trail. Willis invades the home of Jessica Lodge (Catherine O'Hara) and the pair trade lines of dialogue that are flatter than Kansas for the remaining hour of the movie. The sheer boredom of the Embry/Lodge tete a tete is occasionally interrupted by the mindless goings-on next door where the escaped convicts are tunneling their way through the Rutledge's (Hector Elizondo and Judith Ivey) den floor. The cameo cast is rounded out by Dabney Coleman and Rhea Perlman as a pair of decidedly unfunny neighborhood busybodies with a foul-mouthed teenage brat. Given the competition, the stereotypical "sensitive" convicts grab what meager laughs exist. Audience: People looking for laughs who will end up disappointed.