The People Under the Stairs (1991)
Written and directed by Wes Craven

As with Shocker, The People Under the Stairs is an unfiltered shot of Wes Craven's weird sense of humor, a scathing social message wrapped in what looks like a complete hackjob horror flick. Craven later found a more palatable synthesis of humor and horror with the Scream movies, but his much lower budget here makes it hard to see the hipness and hilarity beneath the ramshackle veneer.

It's a brutal and visceral parable of America under Ronald Reagan, with a demented, doddering villain who dons leatherman gear when he unleashes his dark side, and his vicious, repressed, holier-than-thou wife/sister (complete with red hair) who rules the house with an iron fist.

She can be construed as Nancy Reagan or Margaret Thatcher, however deep you want to read the anti-conservative message … together, these two wealthy, sick individuals are hiding a mutant underclass of unintelligible monsters within the walls of their dark and gloomy house, meanwhile raping and beating their one "good girl" daughter ("My So-Called Life" star A.J. Langer, standing in for womankind).

That is, until sassy black boy Fool (Brandon Adams) and smack-talkin' burglar Leroy (Ving Rhames), bust into the place trying to nab a gold coin collection rumored to be stashed inside. This is the societal uprising Malcolm X always dreamed about, I'm sure.

Rhames is killed and gutted, but not before being attacked by a dog, thrown down a stairwell (in an amusingly overlong shot), and delivering golden lines such as: "I done busted this house's cherry." And: "A man ain't dead just 'cuz he's lyin' on the floor."

So it's up to Fool to singlehandedly free the people and liberate the wealth for payback to the community. Here, the film is like a black Home Alone, but with more mutants.

There's loads of intentional cheese and camp (incidentally, waiter, please bring me another side of cheese and camp), and plenty of momentum (if few actual scares). What keeps People from becoming a legitimately great movie is the consistent corner-cutting on visual effects, set design, and staging.

One scene takes us through a dank basement littered with human remains, with a prominent medical skeleton hung on the wall, supposedly a long-dead person, but looking much more like a smiling Halloween decoration. Then there's the makeup of the People Under the Stairs, one of whom has a visible opening at the neck in his rubber mask.

It's too bad, because the commentary is genuinely audacious, and the entire scenario could have been a goldmine. Undoubtedly someone will have the good sense to make a bigger, badder, bolder People Under the Stairs, given the country's return to conservative leadership.

Whether slasher-flicks are the best forum for this kind of dialogue, I don't know … it's about as appropriate as, like, those gay-bashing storylines in "For Better or Worse."

Review by Monger C. Jurisprudence