THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1991 Mark R. Leeper
This is not a review--it is a symposium of ideas about THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS based on an after-film discussion. It will contain spoilers in the same sense that a road sign that says "Bridge Out" is a spoiler.
- Kate Pott, acknowledged film viewer, cautions us that it really would be unfair on the basis of one psychotic cannibal film to condemn all the psychotic cannibal films being made and that many are considerably better than THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS.
- I think it somewhat politically simplistic for this film to suggest that there is sufficient money in the black ghetto for everyone to have a high standard of living, but that the money is all going to killer psychotic slumlords who, through inbreeding, have become crazy as bedbugs. Even if you accepted that premise, I am not sure that their dementia would take the form of kidnapping children for their own and then, when the children become unhappy, imprisoning them in the walls of a house.
- Evelyn Leeper points out that this house that appears small on the outside would not have walls three to four feet thick. Much of this film takes place within the walls of the house and we can see the inside of the walls are excessively spacious.
- Evelyn pointed out that door-to-door salesmen are a much rarer phenomenon than they used to be. The few salesmen who came to the door could not be rendered into sufficient meat to feed the twelve growing children living in the walls of the house.
- I would add that if so many door-to-door salesmen have disappeared it would be fairly easy for the police to pinpoint the trouble spot in the neighborhood.
- I was less than pleased with a plot structure in which all but about ten minutes of screen time is taken up by two over-extended chases through the walls, basement, and roof of a single house.
- Evelyn was not totally pleased with plot elements like having the African-American boy who is the main character mostly trying to earn enough money for a cancer operation to save his mother's life (and wanting to become a doctor someday) and getting advice from his kindly uncle Booker and his somewhat shady friend Leroy.
- I found that in spite of the fact that our main character has found rooms full of money wrested from ghetto tenants, it seems unlikely that the explosions at the end of the film would shower only money on the neighbors waiting outside.
- It was the overall impression of the three of us that this film sucked
pond water. Kate rated it a -2 and Evelyn and I each gave it a -3 on
the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
att!mtgzy!leeper
leeper@mtgzy.att.com
.
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