Getting off on the right foot is vital to a comedy, much more so than to a tragedy, which can afford to put off making you feel miserable. This one -- a comedy, one surmises, about a young couple's travails in fixing up a million-dollar dream house -- starts out aggressively unfunny and eventually escalates to the apocalyptically unfunny: which is to say it starts out with stuff like the mattress sinking through the bed frame, the front door falling off its hinges, the stairway collapsing, the taps in the bathtub spewing out mud, etc., and moves on to overdiagrammed chain-reaction gags in the vein of Steven Spielberg's 1941. (Spielberg was one of the executive producers here; Richard Benjamin directed.) There is perhaps one shot -- in the entire movie -- which seems pretty clever, or at any rate pretty unaggressive: the extreme long shot through a second-story window of someone fighting off some invisible insects. But by that point the jaw is apt to be pretty firmly set. Tom Hanks, Shelley Long. (1986) — Duncan Shepherd
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