THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS
Better'n a bucket o' chum with paprika
Add this movie to the heap of horror flicks I've reviewed recently that seem to want to satirize capitalism/Reaganomics/Republicans/The Man. (settle down, a Dawn Of The Dead review's on its way in the coming weeks)
Wes Craven wrote and directed this one, a few years before he started becoming a director that people actually had their eyes on again. It's also his most ambitious project, where we find him reaching for a lot of things; horror, action, satire, comedy, social commentary. It doesn't always succeed, but it's a great effort, and comes across as a lot of fun regardless of how klutzily some of the material is handled.
Brandon Adams (MIA since 1995) stars as Fool (no, not THE Fool, just Fool, like in King Lear), a kid in the ghetto of some unnamed city who assists his sister's boyfriend (Ving Rhames, back before his in burgling his landlord's home. One he gets in, he finds he can't get out, and the landlord (and lady, who turns out to be the guy's sister, not that this curbs their weird sexual games) has a few surprises for Fool: two-legged mutton on the menu, boobytraps, a savage Rottweiller, some tongueless weirdo moving about in the hollow spaces between the walls, and a pack of pale, scarred cannibals locked up in the basement!
Everett McGill, who can be really terrific when he wants to be, is pretty good as the landlord. He's often seen in head-to-toe bondage gear, and when he's running around the house in that, packing a shotgun and blasting a hole in every wall he sees, he's a real hoot. Unfortunately, some unwisely included aspects of the script make him less threatening than he should be, what with his unbelievably silly victory dance, and his tendency to get hit in the head with things. Still, he's a lot of fun to watch, and so is Wendy Robie as his wife/sister - they played another couple at the time on the Twin Peaks TV series, if I'm not mistaken.
Rhames and the kid are quite good, although Rhames makes his exit way too early. Fool gets saddled with those "funny lines coming from a black guy which were obviously written by a white guy", like "You think he was white before? You should see him now!" But Rhames gets a number of good moments, like when he tells Fool that 13 is the worst age, because you're "too old to get tit, and too young to get ass". (I also liked the moment when, as he jimmies a door with a crowbar, he says to the kid "You're lucky I'm teaching you a trade.") Couldn't stand Kelly Jo Minter as Fool's sister, though; you know how some people, when they swear every other word, sound vulgar, some sound hilarious, and some just sound like idiots? She sounds like an idiot.
The action's exciting, and despite quite a bit of silliness, there's a grisly, macabre tone to the whole thing that makes it all quite unsettling, if not quite frightening. The house is used marvelously as a setting; Craven has really given us the best "haunted" house movie in a very long time. It may stretch plausibility, but this house is so inventively constructed in its network of rooms both obvious and hidden, booby traps planted by both the keeper and the kept, that it's hard to care how absurd any of it is.
Does the satire work? Well, sorta; it doesn't really try that hard, though. It's kind of amusing that McGill refers to Robie as "Mum" (and she reciprocates with "Daddy"), Reagan-style, and I guess you could say that all those (white) cannibals in the basement are the middle class, forced to feed on the poor when there's nothing else left to eat, or something like that. Other than that, we've got your standard "white oppressors/black oppressed" thing which isn't exactly a novel cinematic statement.
Nah, satire isn't what keeps me watching this movie about once a year. Hell, the story resembles a fairy tale more than anything else, not that that's a bad thing. It's just the sheer sense of sick fun, and the weird setting of this "haunted" house with hollow walls, which stirs the imagination. How can you look at your walls - at least, the walls of some big old house - the same way after seeing it?
'course, it ain't ALL fun. The psycho couple has a daughter (A.J. Langer), who they regularly abuse (forcing her into extremely hot water, tormenting her about the murder of her friends, and the more standard beltings and slapping around, of course). It makes sense that they wouldn't exactly be angelic toward this kid - there's one good scene where they force her to clean up a huge bloodstain left by one of their victims - but the movie kind of revels in her abuse, and when it does, everything stops dead.
Likewise film-stopping are the movie's gore and effects, which just aren't very good. This is the kind of gore which works better in the imagination than on the screen (as cannibalism usually does), and when it's shown explicitly, it kind of brings things to a halt. The disemboweled Ving Rhames carcass is very poorly done, as is the obviously rubber human hand that's fed to the pooch. Also, that's the fakest looking fake attacking dog I've ever seen.
Luckily, that's only a few instances. The People Under The Stairs remains a very entertaining movie that went largely unnoticed, attracting the eye of Gene Siskel but that's about it. (he eventually put it on the "Guilty Pleasures" edition of the show, which also included several of my very non-guilty pleasures like Tremors, Evil Dead 2, and Blind Fury)
The ending goes over the top with ludicrous happiness (and allows for a rather convenient discovery of a big stack of dynamite sticks, which are easily wired into an electrically ignited bomb), but I think that's kind of fitting, considering the story's fairy-tale dimensions. Yeah, money raining from the sky on the ghetto residents may be silly (and you know that it wouldn't really solve any problems past a couple of weeks), but you never really believed that "happily ever after" shit, did you?
Highly recommended, and this one lone movie has always been plenty enough to convince me that even though Craven might not always show it off, he's got inventiveness and originality to spare, and when he's good, he's damn good.