There Goes the Neighborhood movie storyline. Prison psychologist Willis Embry reports for work at a New Jersey jail. His day has not gone well – his apartment has just been burgled and his girlfriend left him by placing a message on his answering machine. His group therapy meeting with a bunch of inmates goes no better. Cellmates Lyle and ‘Handsome’ Harry in particular seem beyond help.
In a private meeting later with a cancer-stricken elderly convict named ‘Trick’, who has only a few weeks to live, Embry is taken into his confidence about a job pulled many years earlier when he and some friends stole some $8.5million of Mafia money from a casino skim bank. As his last request, he says that Embry can have half, and give the other half to a female friend named Louise. He tells Embry to go to Cherry Hill and dig down seven feet in the basement of a house on Pleasant Street, number 7322. Unbeknown to them however, Lyle is listening in the cell next-door, though he fails to hear the house number correctly, putting down 7324 instead.
Meanwhile, over at number 7322, things are not going well. Jessie Lodge and her husband Albert are in the middle of a rather messy divorce, and Albert’s way of dividing things in half involves taking a chainsaw to a piano. Across the road neighbours Jeffrey Babbit and Lydia Nunn are supposed to be writing their latest best-selling book, but spend most of their time spying on their neighbours with binoculars from their front window. They are also spying on Norman and Peedi Rutledge, who live at number 7320.
Later, a jailbreak is being made from prison, with former armed robber Marvin helping Lyle and Harry escape from the joint. They disguise themselves as landscape gardeners. Marvin has left behind a surprise for Willis at his flat, a tripwire attached to a bomb. Laden with heavy groceries, Willis drops them on the floor and notices a tin rolling across the floor to the wire, just managing to jump clear from the building in time which is engulfed by a huge explosion. The neighbors and police think he is dead, despite there being no sign of a body.
Next morning Norman Rutledge is about to leave for work in his car when a landscape gardeners van blocks his exit, and Lyle, Harry and Marvin emerge to take him back inside, where Norman’s wife Peedi is also taken hostage. The couple are questioned about the floor in their basement and the three circles and a triangle that should mark the spot of the treasure. Circles or no circles, the crooks decide to dig in the basement anyway. Meanwhile, Embry arrives next door at number 7322 and poses as a furnace engineer to get inside Jessie Lodge’s house and scout the basement for the digging spot. When she realises he isn’t an engineer however, she throws him out.
There Goes the Neighborhood, released as Paydirt in most foreign countries, is a 1992 comedy film. The film tells a story of a dying prisoner who whispers the location of his loot to the facility’s psychologist Willis Embry (Jeff Daniels) who heads to the New Jersey suburbs to find it.
There Goes the Neighborhood (1992)
Directed by: Bill Phillips
Starring: Jeff Daniels, Catherine O’Hara, Hector Elizondo, Rhea Perlman, Judith Ivey, Harris Yulin, Jonathan Banks, Chazz Palminteri, Mary Gross, Jeremy Piven
Screenplay by: Bill Phillips
Production Design by: Dean Tschetter
Cinematography by: Walt Lloyd
Film Editing by: Sharyn L. Ross
Costume Design by: Sandy Davidson
Set Decoration by: Michele Starbuck
Art Direction by: Randy Moore
Music by: David Bell
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for one use of strong language.
Distributed by: Paramount Pictures
Release Date: October 30, 1992
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