Leggo My Ghetto

Year: 1991

Director: Wes Craven

Cast: Brandon Adams, Everett McGill, Wendy Robie

Run Time: 1 hour 42 minutes 

MPAA Rating: R

August 20th marked the one-year anniversary of the passing of horror master Wes Craven, which prompted me to redouble my efforts to finish watching through his deceptively vast filmography. Considering that my last foray into his work was the surreally compromised Cursed, I decided to treat myself to the best of his movies that I haven’t seen yet, at least according to consensus opinion: The People Under the Stairs. I made the right choice.

Equal parts goofy, clever, disturbing, and socially aware, The People Under the Stairs is like directly communing with Craven’s spirit. All of his most beloved qualities are present, dressed in their Sunday best.

Which didn’t mean much in the fashion-impaired 90’s, but still.

In The People Under the Stairs, Fool (Brandon Adams) lives in the ghetto with his family and his ailing single mother. They’re the last family standing in their crumbling apartment complex, which the landlords want to tear down and replace with office buildings, and they’ve been given one day to pay the rent before they’re evicted. Friend of the family Leroy (Ving Rhames) convinces Fool that the only way to get the money is to rob the landlords themselves, who are said to have a vast collection of gold coins.

They break in and soon discover that their crime might not be so easy. The landlords, who call themselves Mommy (Wendy Robie) and Daddy (Everett McGill), look like the perfect suburban couple, but their inescapable house hides sinister secrets, including their abused daughter Alice (A. J. Langer) and a basement full of mutilated boys they’ve captured in an attempt to find the perfect son.

It’s cheaper than adopting, I guess.

I’d say that The People Under the Stairs is the most Wes Craven-y movie he ever made, but for the fact that it doesn’t feature a single dream sequence. That was kind of his thing. But for a movie with both feet planted firmly in reality, it’s decidedly surreal. It’s another twisted nightmare vision of white suburbia, but from a unique angle. Instead of depicting the skeletons in the closet of a nuclear family from the perspective of their own children, Craven has a complete stranger discover the abuse and evil while trapped inside with it.

The People Under the Stairs is also the Craven movie with the most consistent setting, as over 80% of the film takes place in and around the landlords’ household. So as much as it is a perfect evocation of his favorite themes and styles, it’s also a wholly distinct entry in his filmography. All of these factors combine to create a film that is claustrophobic, startling, and extremely special.

Like getting engaged in a mineshaft.

But enough of my Craven fandom pontification. What I really want to impress upon you about The People Under the Stairs is that it’s freakin’ awesome. It’s a no-holds-barred adventure through a cavernous home full of secret doors, booby traps, and hidden crawlspaces, a non-stop thrill ride of blood and guns and slavering dog jowls. It’s everything Don’t Breathe wanted to be but couldn’t quite muster the energy.

It’s also an over-the-top geyser of goofiness, but that only highlights the insanity of the situation. This delicate tonal balance rests easily in the hands of Everett McGill and Wendy Robie who, as Twin Peaks alums, know exactly how far to take things. McGill is hilarious, mugging through his scenes like he’s a fourth Stooge in a leather gimp suit, and Robie goes full Mommie Dearest, channeling her best Grand Diva as a shrill, knife-wielding harpy. Their insane couple is like Ward and June Cleaver by way of Tobe Hooper: Unpredictable and captivating, sublimely funny yet effortlessly chilling.

This vein of silliness is actually perfect for the film, because it creates a heightened reality that allows for hyperbolic horror to enter the picture. The family’s basement of reject children might have been laughable in a different movie, but in People Under the Stairs it’ a disturbing yet pitiful display. When Fool discovers this basement of horrors, the sight imprints itself on your mind as one of the iconic images of horror that you will remember until the end of time.

Or maybe that’s just me. But still. Great.

The People Under the Stairs is just plain fun chock full of clever dialogue and well-shaded, memorable characters. And none of that undermines its powerful but reasonably subtle anti-gentrification message. It’s a film about the cruelty other humans inflict upon one another, but it’s also a humanist fairy tale about how oppressed minorities can rise up and stand together as a community.

Seriously, Wes Craven was killing it in the 90’s. Between The People Under the Stairs, New Nightmare, Scream, and Scream 2, he was operating at the top of his game (Vampire in Brooklyn? Never heard of it), and this film is just one more dab of cement that solidifies his reputation as a true blue master of horror.

TL;DR: The People Under the Stairs is a gleefully campy, tense, massively underrated Craven gem.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 862

Nuke Kids On The Block

Year: 1989

Director: Steve De Jarnatt

Cast: Anthony Edwards, Mare Winningham, John Agar

Run Time: 1 hour 27 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Nuclear war was a common topic in American film of the 1980's, rivaled only by the glut of "whoops, we made a radiation monster" films of the 50's. Perhaps the most famous is 1983's WarGames, in which a young Matthew Broderick almost incites the nuclear holocaust by playing a computer game - something avid fans of online gaming might have experience with if they've ever cost an experienced team a round.

It's not like the threat of nuclear devastation has ever completely gone away, but in today's everyday world it seems about as far-fetched a possibility as an asteroid smashing into the planet. It's something people might fear, but in a more abstract, less immediate way. However, because I am a connoisseur of finding things to worry about, I have a unique empathetic skill among my age group - the ability to put myself in a position where I can relate to the nuclear fears of the generations before my own.

For that reason and that reason alone, I was able to extract every last crumb of tension from the premise of the remarkably silly late-nuclear period movie that is 1989's Miracle Mile. However, if you are not me, this movie will almost entirely fail to rile you. But it's fun enough as a hunk of 80's trash that I'd still recommend it to the non-discerning viewer.

And any fan of dollar store brand Dolph Lundgrens.

Harry Washello (Anthony Edwards) is a struggling musician living in Los Angeles. When he meets Julie Peters (Mare Winningham) at a local museum, it's love at first sight. For the first twenty minutes or so, the film progresses like a generic indie rom-com (They do quirky things like visit the tar pits, play with a prism, and buy lobsters from a restaurant only to set them free. Also Julie's grandparents are deeply in love but haven't spoken with one another for 15 years.), made even stranger by the fact that this genre wouldn't be in vogue until a couple decades later. My guess is that they were going for a straight romance but the stars they chose were so flippin' nerdy that they accidentally shunted the script into being ahead of its time.

Not exactly Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler.

But after he sleeps through their second date, Harry ends up eating away his feelings at a diner at 4 in the morning. As if that wasn't enough stress to deal with, he answers a call on a pay phone and discovers that the American government has ordered a nuclear strike and the retaliation is due to come in 70 minutes, destroying the city.

Thus begins an epically cheesy cross-city journey as Harry attempts to locate Julie and get her to an escape helicopter - featuring a Tangerine Dream soundtrack, Nightmare on Elm Street 5's Kelly Jo Minter, and Mare Winningham's orange feathered mullet - a tangerine nightmare, if you will. 

But first, the single best scene in the movie and perhaps the only moment where it operates on a level outside of fatuous 80's frivolity. You see, the original concept for Miracle Mile was that it would be a segment in Twilight Zone: The Movie, evoking classic episodes like "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" with a single location depicting various individuals bouncing off of one another under the strain of a potentially imaginary threat.

And if you're looking for a group of unique individuals with diverse backgrounds to populate your story, you could do worse than an LA diner at 4 in the morning. Here we get two womanizing workmen, a flight attendant in training, a stern businesswoman, a snarky drag queen, a hapless waitress, and a hotheaded cook struggling to face the harshest reality the cultural climate could possibly provide.

This section of the film is taut, edgy, and clever, providing a thin slice of true humanity in a movie that will soon devolve into admittedly enjoyable but much less rewarding excesses. But for those shining moments, Miracle Mile exposes the truly remarkable anthology segment it could have been.

Although the stranglehold of the 80's can never be fully eradicated.

Although nothing else can quite match the dizzy heights of this scene's incisive tension, the rest of the film is pure confection SPOILERS [save for the shockingly bleak ending that would be emotionally resonant if it didn't follow 50 minutes of pure 80's tomfoolery]. Once the cross-city antics begin, character motivations fly right out the window. In fact, they smash headfirst through a wall and call it a window.

Harry wanders through a barren Los Angeles at a speed more suitable for a trip to the supermarket than a frantic escape making terrible decisions left and right, including but not limited to leaving the helicopter pad to explore a neon-spandex nightmare gym and refusing to tell Julie what's going on until the very last second, rendering her completely useless to his cause. Also a guy decides to avoid ten years in jail for stealing stereos by lighting two cops on fire. It's like the screenwriters exhausted themselves after the diner scene and just let Mare Winningham's mullet write the rest of the script as it brushed across a keyboard.

An American Hero.

The 80's signifiers take care of the rest, bulking up the back half of the movie with enough content to remain engaging. And the filmmaking itself is decent, especially in the first act - in which nearly every camera shot just begs us to look to the skies:

And I'm sure this is symbolic of... something. Ice age = nuclear winter? Kevin Smith's new movie sucking? I dunno, I'm sure someone can fill in the blanks. I can't move my eyes from her hair long enough to focus on the composition.

Miracle Mile, for what it's worth, could be much much worse than it is. As it stands, it ranges from being a delectable nuclear thriller to an ebullient cheese tray, so at the very least it's never boring. I wish the third act could sustain its tone more to really bring the apocalyptic mayhem home, but this depiction of the end of the world is not at the end of my list.

Solid effort. Would detonate.

TL;DR: Miracle Mile is a cheesy 80's train wreck, but at times manages to be the taut nuclear thriller that it wants to be.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1038

Census Bloodbath: O Is For Oh No

Today's Blogging From A to Z Challenge post is the next step in our exploration of the Freddy franchise, the final Nightmare film of the 80's!

Year: 1989

Director: Stephen Hopkins

Cast: Robert Englund, Lisa Wilcox, Kelly Jo Minter

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

It's not often that a film will immediately announce its inferiority to its predecessor, as A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child does during its opening credits. In a series that rarely if ever went the "boobs and guts" route of its slasher brethren (I'm fairly certain that the only breasts in the franchise are during Joey's wet dreams in Parts 3 and 4), they had the absence of mind to include a sex scene before the very first line of dialogue even began.

It's not even a good one, all shot with gender-obscuring blue light and extravagant close-ups that abstract the human form so much that you can't even tell what part you're looking at, just that it's writhing uncomfortably like it's trying not to drown in quicksand. Immediately following this scene we get a shower sequence because god forbid we think this film has even an iota of class before it commences in earnest.

As you can probably surmise, I do not like this film. It's not a good film. In fact, it's so bad that it actually retroactively ruins the quite stellar film that precedes it. The Dream Master Alice Johnson (Lisa Wilcox), one of my personal favorite Final Girls returns and is utterly wasted, having apparently forgotten how to actually be a master of dreams and dying the crap out of her lovely ginger hair.

With only one year left to go, the 80's finally claimed her.

All of this serves to blandify (Of course it's a word. I just wrote it, didn't I?) one of my favorite characters in the entire franchise next to Nancy Thompson. It's all just a waste, compounded by the fact that the other alumnus of The Dream Master, Alice's jock boyfriend Dan (Danny Hassel) returns to be super hot, but he dies early on and his torso is framed out of every scene he's in.

What a tease.

To rub salt in the wound, the platter of Meat this time around is a queasy array of less than prime cuts. Forgetting the charming characters of the last film or even the one-note human-shaped dialogue puppets that populated Dream Warriors, The Dream Child opted for paper-thin characters (some of whom are literally made of paper by the end) with hardly half a note between them all.

There's Yvonne (Kelly Jo Minter) who is ethnic and a swimmer and works at the hospital when it's convenient (As a nurse? This high school's extracurricular program's must be off the chain), and is kind of a douchebag; Greta (Erika Anderson) who is a model and although Anderson tries her hardest to make her likable, she's given absolutely nothing to work with; and Mark (Joe Seeley), who draws comics. That's it. The end. It's enough to make you sick.

And I haven't even gotten to Freddy yet. He made his full transition to chuckling prankster in the last film, but at least the heavy layer of 80's cheese and talented visual vocabulary kept that one going strong. In this film he pushes it even further, beyond the point of lovable huckster and into the dismal depths.

My face the entire time.

The death scenes are a rapid-fire MTV style deluge of hallucinogenic images accompanied by a machine gun clatter of nonsensical puns. Several of them are funny in a begrudging way like jokes your father makes (ie. when he turns into a car to kill Dan and says "Don't dream and drive!") but his nonstop patter eventually descends into lobbing out loosely related phrases like he's trying to beat his high score in charades. 

These "puns" are so far from threatening they might not even technically be in the script (in a continuation of the car sequence, Freddy begins to shout "Fuel injection! Power drive! Fast lane!" and I begin to cry). Perhaps they just appeared in the final cut movie as the result of some ill-advised tampering with a Lovecraftian alternate dimension of horrible jokes. And, when in doubt, the screenwriters have him end sentences with ", bitch!" like it's going out of style. Which, if this movie is any indication, was a pretty accurate assumption.

Englund is clearly hating his life in this film (Which he has subsequently claimed to be his least favorite. This is a man who was in C.H.U.D. II - Bud the Chud.) and the makeup is exceedingly subpar. Most of the time, he looks like a cross between Shrek and a particularly forlorn sock monkey. I question whether or not the visual effects artist actually watched any of the previous films. 

Or any films at all.

This is the first film where the complaints lodged against the franchise as character-less horror-less special effects extravaganzas really begin to reflect the truth. The plot is minimal and dull, so what keeps the film trucking along is a endless stream of effects setpieces that rush down the track like chocolates on the conveyor belt in that I Love Lucy episode.

By the end of the film I was too stunned into submission by the film's insipidity that it barely even registered when Freddy skateboarded across the room or uttered a line that tried so hard to be a pun that it strained itself and died or trapped Alice in an M. C. Escher room straight out of Labyrinth.

Although the film is an utter failure as horror or comedy cinema (or cinema in general - many important scenes are framed behind foreground objects and/or blatantly cross the 180 Degree line and their idea of exposition includes one character looking at her own name tag in the middle of work), it's so startlingly bad that it's a tremendous film to mock. So I wouldn't rate it down there with the dull muddy slashers that have absolutely zero merit, but this film is a disgusting pock on the remarkable legacy of Wes Craven's masterpiece.

Killer: Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund)

Final Girl: Alice Johnson (Lisa Wilcox)

Best Kill: Mark is killed inside what could only be the music video for "Take On Me."

Sign of the Times: This guy.

Scariest Moment: Freddy returns as a shrieking melty beaked mutant child.

Weirdest Moment: Freddy's arm is apparently made of teleporting spiders.

Champion Dialogue: "Time to die, you scar-faced limp dick!"

Body Count: 3; I'm just as surprised as you.

1. Dan is fused with a motorcycle and crashes into a truck.
2. Greta is force-fed dinner until she chokes to death.
3. Mark is turned into paper and slashed into pieces. 

TL;DR: A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child is just the worst.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1152

Reviews In This Series

A Nightmare on Elm Street (Craven, 1984)

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (Sholder, 1985)

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (Russell, 1987)

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (Harlin, 1988)

A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (Hopkins, 1989)

Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (Talalay, 1991)

Wes Craven's New Nightmare (Craven, 1994)

Freddy vs. Jason (Yu, 2003)

A Nightmare on Elm Street (Bayer, 2010)