Popcorn Kernels: Cravin' Wes

As we approach the end of my long-running quest to watch every film ever directed by Wes Craven (only 4 TV movies to go!), let’s explore two interesting little scraps of his career: the final theatrical film I had yet to see, and the one porn film we’re pretty much 100% certain he directed, during his time working in New York in the sleazy 70’s.

Vampire in Brooklyn

Year: 1995

Director: Wes Craven

Cast: Eddie Murphy, Angela Bassett, Allen Payne 

Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

An ancient Caribbean vampire arrives in modern New York City to seduce a lovely cop on the mean streets of Brooklyn.

1995 found Wes Craven in a very strange place. Just a year earlier he had created his latest masterpiece, New Nightmare, to very little fanfare. As much as that film proved he still had the capacity for intelligent, engaging horror, he was still chafing against he constraints of the genre, which hadn’t afforded him a truly sizeable hit in over a decade. So when he learned that superstar funnyman Eddie Murphy wanted to work with him, he leapt at the opportunity. Unfortunately, as it often happened for Craven, he found himself in yet another behind-the-scenes straitjacket.

While Craven assumed he’d be making a comedy, Murphy insisted he wanted to make a straight horror picture. Both men wanted to break free from their typecast genre, but the star’s wishes carried more weight with the studio. Thus we get another film that feels like a tug of war between two entirely opposite sensibilities. However, unlike the equally uneven Deadly Friend, Vampire in Brooklyn pulls together into something more or less amusing, even if it makes next to no sense as it goes along (something which is patently not improved by Murphy’s Blade Runner voiceover that runs through the whole thing like a rusty monorail).

The horror elements are passable, but they’re attempting to resurrect a stately, classic gothic feel that has never made a dent on my nerves in the first place, and they’re intermittently successful. What really saves this film, and I’m a teensy bit loathe to admit it, is its admirably goofy sense of humor. While it undercuts the horror at every turn, that horror wasn’t particularly strong to begin with. Hell, the climax, which I solely horror, is an interminable slog in spite of Murphy’s surprisingly subdued performance and convincing chemistry with the devastatingly sexy Angela Bassett.

No, with Vampire in Brooklyn, the goofier it gets, the better it is. OK, there may be some indefensible scenes that have Murphy Klumping it up in various silly costumes, but the movie frequently hits a register that evokes classic Blaxploitation by way of a Sam Raimi splatter flick. This is most evident in the gleefully gross performance by Kadeem Hardison as Julius Jones, a dock-worker turned ghoulish assistant. As his body rots due to the vampire’s magic, parts of him fall off at very inopportune moments. It’s a very juvenile, Monty Python Black Knight style of body horror slapstick, but especially when he’s paying off John Witherspoon as his grouchy landlord, it’s downright hilarious. A lot of these funny scenes (especially any with the Italian mobsters infesting the town) are pitched at a very high register, but Craven embraces his camp sensibilities and thus allows it to flourish.

Vampire in Brooklyn is no masterpiece, but it’s a diverting way to spend 95 minutes. Almost any other Craven film is a more worthwhile watch, but this one certainly has its cheesy charms.

Rating: 6/10

The Fireworks Woman

Year: 1975

Director: Abe Snake

Cast: Jennifer Jordan, Helen Madigan, Erica Eaton 

Run Time: 1 hour 13 minutes

MPAA Rating: X

A young woman with the possibly supernatural power to ignite lust in those around her pursues an ex-flame who’s a priest… and her brother.

Now, just to reassure any lawyers who happen to have stumbled across this blog, it has not been conclusively proven that Wes Craven directed this pornographic film, though it is known he spent years in the New York porn industry as an editor and producer. The film is officially credited as being written and directed by Abe Snake (and co-written by Hørst Badörties, which I suspect is a pseudonym for the Swedish Chef), but any scholar of Craven could tell you instantly that his fingerprints are all over the project.

For one thing, Wes Craven literally plays a character in the movie: the mysterious Fireworks Man who may or may not be the Devil. It’s kinda hard to deny your involvement when you face is on celluloid, beard or no beard. But even if his literal face was nowhere to be seen, his spirit thrums through the entire story, which chews on a lot of the favorite themes that he would return to over and over again throughout his career: repression of desire leading to violence, the potency of dreams (especially nightmares), the oppressive and hypocritical nature of the church, and the dark side of the suburban family unit.

The entire DNA of his career, from Nightmare on Elm Street to The People Under the Stairs, to My Soul to Take, is present in a film where a woman makes love to her brother with Pachelbel’s “Canon in D” playing in the background. What a trajectory! Being a porno movie, the plot is understandably rather repetitive, but he fact that it has themes worth mentioning at all speaks to Craven’s irrepressible intelligence.

That said, I can’t understand why any self-respecting heterosexual would find the film particularly erotic. A massively uncomfortable rape scene is shoehorned in (though, true to Craven’s ever-goofy form, in the same scene a man is hit over the head with a giant fish), and most of the consensual sex is underscored by tittering, nightmarish Insidious music. It actually kinds works as a horror film, melding woozy dream imagery and penetrative sex in a beautifully eerie fantasia.

Let’s not kid ourselves that The Fireworks Woman is worth seeing by anyone but the most institutionally insane Craven fan, but speaking as one of those, it was certainly an interesting insight into a burgeoning creative mind stripped of all propriety.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1032

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

Be As Thou Wast Wont To Be

Year: 2008

Director: Tom Gustafson

Cast: Tanner Cohen, Wendy Robie, Zelda Williams

Run Time: 1 hour 35 minutes
MPAA Rating: N/A

It is difficult for me to even begin discussing Were the World Mine without slipping into hyperbole. Despite its flaws - and any canny viewer may note that there are several - the film is the single non-horror movie most attuned to my preferences. In addition to being an aggressively stylish, gleefully campy, devilishy handsome, subtly meaningful film, Were the World Mine is above all most notable for two things:

1. It is a musical.
2. It is a gay retelling of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

If that doesn't sound like your cup of tea, you are patently not myself. But although its core concept is immensely appealing to Yours Truly, the film has enough bulk to break through my bias and prove its wonderfulness in its own right. But I may not be as biased as it seems -Private Romeo, the gay version of Romeo and Juliet set at a military academy is conceptually perfect for me, but it's one of the only movies in existence that I turned off halfway through. And I've sat through all 82 soul-gouging minutes of The Outing. Hell, I've survived Bee Movie. I'm a veteran of this kind of thing.

I mean, scenes like this help, but the movie is legitimately good. Trust me on this.

The story revolves around Timothy (Tanner Cohen), a gay student who goes to an all-boys private school in a very conservative neck of the woods. He lives with his mother (Judy McClane) in a realistically worn-in house (I only note this because aren't we collectively getting tired of "poor" characters living in luxury in opulent palaces? We are the 99%! The part of the population who aren't fictive TV personalities.) as she struggles to find a job and pay his way through his education.

While the school's rugby team sees fit to bully him all day long, Timothy nurses a crush on their hunky captain Jonathon (Nathaniel David Becker) - his only classmate who actually seems to see him as a human being and not just a pincushion of relentless torment. Dibs on the band name. He is thrown into conflict with them more and more as they are forced to spend time together rehearsing the mandatory senior play. You win absolutely nothing for guessing what that play just so happens to be.

As is true of nearly all films on the LGBT spectrum, Were the World Mine has a disastrously low budget. The "living in a crackerjack box eating the shoes off your own feet" kind of low. But unlike just about every single glittering one of those other flicks, it turns that lack of means into an outright strength.

You see, when Timothy discovers a secret recipe hidden inside a magic script (did I mention camp?), he recreates the flower from the play. You know, the one with the juice that can make anybody fall in love with the first person they see? Put yourself in Timothy's position. What would you do with a flower like this if you discovered it in high school? He absolutely uses that sh*t to get Jonathon to fall in love with him and make all the rugby guys turn gay for each other.

The flower also gives them impeccable skill with a chrome makeup brush.

Rife with fantasy sequences and mystical forest dances numbers, the ambitious aesthetic of the film must have had the accountant tearing his hair out by the roots. But by using a trick harnessed in 1984's A Nightmare on Elm Street of all things, these sequences gain their power from their homegrown design. Utilizing high school theater sets and costuming and reappropriating actors from the student body ensemble, the film at once saves money and unites the film under a singular theme.

Director Tom Gustafson's visual prowess is such that, even with these limitations, he manages to assemble dazzling compositions of color and light, utilizing the human form in his staging in a way that wouldn't be out of place in the most high-falutin', champagne reception, Sundance exclusive of art films.

Show me a gay movie at this budget with a frame even half as lovely as this eye-popping purple extravaganza and I will show you a lying charlatan.

But the best part about this quite literal high school fantasy is the message, taken from Midsummer itself. Though Timothy has his puckish fun with the young lovers, he learns that he is interfering with their true feelings, much in the way that they were with him. It is unusual that a gay film has a bifurcate message, but Were the World Mine pulls it off with aplomb, simultaneously depicting a "teach the town to be open minded" fable with a dash of "teach yourself the same thing." In this way, Were the World Mine is utterly human, embracing our flaws and pushing us all to change and be a little more forgiving in all regards.

It also doesn't hurt that the songs are hella rad.

With lyrics culled exclusively from Shakespeare-penned lines, Cohen's soaring falsetto, and an Eastern musical styling providing a tonal undercurrent, the music in the film is unutterably perfect, by far the most consistently satisfying and unimpeachable element of the movie as a whole. Whether it's perfectly capturing the feeling of "catching" in an audition after a wobbly start or the hellish sting of a broken heart, the music pumps the film with pure, unadulterated feeling.

And let us never forget that this aesthetic is SO.

DAMN.

PRETTY. 

(Also, that's Robin Williams' daughter, Zelda.)

Were the World Mine exists in a register halfway between camp and sincerity. But whether it's Ms. Tebbit (Wendy Robie), the zany English teacher appearing out of nowhere to spout hilariously stilted lines like "I'll note you in my book of memory" with the zeal of an older actress who has nothing to lose or a final moment that is reminiscent of The Great Train Robbery, the entire picture is utterly genuine. This renders the camp moments fun and the serious moments (especially the strain on the relationship between Timothy and his single mother) tender. Honestly, if I fully understood how Tom Gustafson managed this, I wouldn't be here writing about it. I'd be out there making the sequel.

And any doubts about the acting (Wendy Robie is an eternal gem, but Tanner Cohen has a little trouble shifting gears during the first act and the ensemble is occasionally dubious) are swept away with a tidal wave of style and pure musicality.

In spite of its strong style, there are a few intractable issues with the film, typically due to its low budget equipment. The sound in the exterior scenes is murky at best and the cinematography during the non-dazzling moments has a perplexing tendency to cut together a little roughly, like there wasn't enough coverage for certain particular moments.

But we takes what we gets with indie cinema and Were the World Mine is such an eminently euphoric fantasy film that its faults are occluded by pure joy. If you're not in the target audience for this dazzling film, you know who you are. But I highly recommend it to anyone and everyone. Gay or straight, young or old, Simon or Garfunkel, this film has something for everyone and deserves to be appreciated far beyond its mild cult audience.

Also it's on Netflix, so you have no excuse. Go. Now. Let me know what you think. I hope you love it. And if you don't, well... If we shadows have offended, think but this and all is mended- that you have but slumbered here while these visions did appear.

Good night unto you all.

TL;DR: Were the World Mine is certainly beholden to some low budget indie movie flaws, but is next to perfect stylistically and musically.
Rating: 10/10
Word Count: 1323