Multiple listings and laughs

With the real estate market the way it is, you probably need a good laugh, and there's no better place to find one than in Armen Kaprelian's

Closing Escrow,

released directly to DVD this month.

The "mockumentary," filmed in the style of Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy's 2003 A Mighty Wind, tracks three couples and their agents searching for that "perfect house" in Southern California.

If you've watched any of the virtually endless numbers of "reality based" real estate shows on cable television over the last few years, you know that they are all shot in Southern California with the most bizarre characters available at scale.

The people in Closing Escrow are anywhere from weird and a half to double weird. When this DVD ends after 93 minutes, you'll be glad you live in the Philadelphia region.

Hillary Macella (Wendi McLendon-Covey of Reno 911) is a "sensitive" agent who threatens to file a complaint against a listing agent who describes shutters on the windows of a $1.5 million downtown loft as "plantation-style," but she is the very same agent who asks her African American lawyer clients, Tamika and Bobby White (April Barnett and Reno 911's Cedric Yarbrough), if their need for an urban location is to be near "all sporting events, like basketball . . . "

When the Whites learn Tamika is expecting, Hillary is reluctant to shift her search to the suburbs, suggesting that the Whites have "options" regarding her pregnancy. "I know a doctor," she says.

Another couple includes "life coach" Dawn Ernst (Patty Wortham), who "courted" husband Tom (Andrew Friedman) for a year and a half, at one point setting fire to his lawn to get his attention.

"Dawn kept popping up in my life in random places," Tom says. "My former wife said it was stalking; I thought it was an honor."

Their agent, Richard Bilotti (Ryan Smith), works out of a building on an abandoned military testing site. Richard lowers asking prices with the help of a tire iron and circular saw, with dead rabbits in the sellers' mailboxes for extra emphasis.

"Every time they raise the security alert to orange, we think of Richard," Dawn says.

In between are Allen and Mary Lawton (Rob Brownstein and Colleen Crabtree) and their agent Peter Jacobsen (Bruce Thomas), who gives second billing to location and believes "when you first walk into a house, never, never, never breathe through your nose. Most houses smell really bad."

While they are reluctant to move, Allen makes it even harder by remodeling the house to make it look like Peter's, who lives across the street.

The extras on this DVD are pretty much the usual, the making of, behind the scenes and deleted scenes.

While Closing Escrow is meant for laughs, there's enough reality on the small screen to keep you at home for a long, long time.

With April Barnett, Ryan Smith, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Cedric Yarbrough, and Andrew Friedman.

Price: $26.98

Parent's guide: PG (adult themes, profanity, crude humor and incidental smoking)

The extras: ** Making of Closing Escrow, Deleted Scenes, and Behind the Scenes.EndText