THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS
A review in the public domain
by The Phantom
(baumgart@esquire.dpw.com)
The Phantom missed the opening titles for THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS, Wes Craven's latest horror film -- he was under the impression that it took less than 30 minutes to get from lower Manhattan to midtown, an impression the New York City Transit Authority apparently doesn't share -- so he doesn't know how good they were. Perhaps they were clever; perhaps they were scary; perhaps they leaped onto the screen from under a staircase. The Phantom just doesn't know, since he arrived just a few moments too late to catch them. He sincerely hopes that they were good, however, since most of the rest of the film (which he did not, unfortunately, arrive too late to miss) ranged from bad to awful; from dopey to imbecilic; from silly to sorry.
Simply put, PEOPLE is a mess. Worse still, it's Wes' mess -- all of it. Though one can look at the last few scenes of EXORCIST III and see the meddling hand of nervous studio executives -- people who felt that if William Friedkin's excellent and very literate film didn't have at least one gory exorcism, no one would go see it -- it's quite obvious that PEOPLE was Wes' baby from first reel to last.
It's hard to say what was going through Craven's mind when he set out to make this film. Although it's possible to make a horror film that also works as a comedy, it's not an easy task, and the result is rarely successful as either a horror film or a comedy. Sam Raimi's EVIL DEAD 2 did succeed in this, but it also had the luxury of having a successful horror film -- the original EVIL DEAD -- to satirize. On the other hand, consider the abominable sequel to THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. Here again, director Tobe Hooper had the opportunity to satirize the classic original, but the result was as close to a complete failure as is imaginable. TCM II worked neither as a horror film nor as a comedy, though it did manage to make those who saw it feel profoundly sorry for everyone involved in the production. That kind of sympathy isn't easy to elicit, and Hooper should be given some credit for getting whole theaters full of people to blush and turn their heads away in embarrassment. It's an achievement that's not perhaps on the same level as getting whole theaters full of people to laugh or cringe with terror, but it's an achievement nonetheless.
Unfortunately, getting whole theaters full of people to scratch their heads, turn to their companions, and wonder aloud how such a terrible film could ever have been made is not the way to establish yourself as one of the masters of cinematic horror. Although Craven has had far more successes than has Tobe Hooper (whose goofy, nearly nonsensical LIFEFORCE came to mind at several points during the ludicrous goings on in Craven's film), he's also been rather uneven; for every HILLS HAVE EYES and NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, we seem to get an equal number of films like SHOCKER, DEADLY BLESSING, DEADLY FRIEND (which Leonard Maltin claims is the only movie ever made in which someone is beheaded by a basketball) and his latest, THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS.
At his best and when working with a strong story, Wes Craven is able to fashion small, self-contained worlds of terror, in which ordinary people get caught up in extraordinary events. His camera work, sense of pacing, and visual flair are strikingly good -- especially in a genre that provides employment to so many untalented hacks -- and even films as dumb as SHOCKER or as bad as THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS look terrific. His films all have a rich, colorful texture that's rarely seen in the generally flat and uninteresting horror product churned out of Hollywood with dismaying regularity these days. Oftentimes the way a film looks and "feels" is as important as what's actually going on onscreen; after all, David Lynch's classic ERASERHEAD manages to unnerve nearly everyone who sees it, even though very very little actually happens. Sam Raimi's unsteady camera work and grainy film stock helped make the audience for THE EVIL DEAD feel that things in that film were somewhat out of control, and that Raimi wasn't going to feel bound by the traditional agreement between directors and their audiences: that no matter how gruesome or disturbing individual scenes may get, the film will soon return to normality and another seven or eight minutes of pointless dialogue and exposition.
Alas, Craven's latest film looks great but feels like a week in bed with the flu. It may just be coincidence, but by the end of THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS, the Phantom was feeling decidedly under the weather, and since then he seems to be unable to shake a nagging headache and occasional chills (notably absent during the film). It could, of course, be winter's first cold; on the other hand, it could also be the first outward manifestation of the horror malaise that the Phantom has been in the grip of since he saw CHILD'S PLAY 3 -- certainly none of the horror films the Phantom has seen since had to work too hard to generate headaches and occasional drowsiness. Call it Chronic Disappointment Syndrome, if you will. The Phantom plans on taking some extra vitamin C and staying in bed until CAPE FEAR opens next week, on the assumption that Dr. Scorsese and his able assistant Dr. DeNiro will have a cure.
There's a fundamental conceptual problem at the heart of THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS: the notion that a crazy, sadistic couple could trap and keep dozens of teenage boys in their basement, feed them with table scraps and bits of the mailman, deprive each of them of their freedom, their dignity and their humanity, and then have them just *live* there and in the walls of their home like overgrown, bipedal rats, really puts rather a strain on our credulity. Oh, sure, they do give the boys flashlights and a generous supply of replacement batteries -- and goodness knows, that alone would keep the Phantom in someone's basement for at least a week or two -- but after a few minutes, when we realize that Craven doesn't intend these boys to be spirits or vampires or pets, and that he really intends for us to buy this loopy premise, it becomes painfully obvious that Craven won't be able to stop THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS from turning into first a comedy of the absurd and then a travesty of the inane.
Even if we put aside the film's obvious logical flaws -- the enormous and rather unlikely amount of space between the walls of the house; the apparently huge interior of what from the outside appears to be a very modest sized home; the football field-sized basement; the ability of a small boy repeatedly to get in and out of a house from which twenty or so other boys apparently cannot escape -- there's too much about THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS that just doesn't make sense. Why throw in the interminable nonsense about this couple being slumlords who apparently own half the buildings in the "ghetto"? What difference does it make if the little boy and his family are going to be evicted? Can Craven possibly believe that anyone in the audience actually cares about these cardboard people? The film spends a lot of time explaining who this crazy couple is and what they're doing to the good folks in the "ghetto", but to what end? After all, it's likely that presenting these people as child abusers and cannibals would be enough to get the audience clamoring for their demise -- making them landlords on top of everything else will certainly help whip the audience into a frenzy of hatred, but it will likely do so at the expense of the story's suspense. As is always the case with horror, too much explanation spoils the broth, and with THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS, Craven makes the very mistake he so neatly avoided in A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET and THE HILLS HAVE EYES: he spends much too long trying to explain who these people are and why they're doing what they're doing. No one really needed to know Freddy's whole sordid history -- a few hints sufficed -- and goodness knows the freakish family in the HILLS didn't require any explanation at all. The action and the terror spoke for themselves.
But in THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS, Craven seems to have decided to make a very nasty "movie of the week"; to that end, he apparently further decided that his audience wouldn't be able to accept the rather unlikely premise of the film if he didn't devote 30 minutes to the after-school special-like story-within-a-story about the poor but brave little black boy and his poor but deserving family. Had this 30 minutes all been concentrated at the beginning of the film, perhaps the Phantom could advise his phans to arrive a half-hour late; alas, Craven has carefully placed stop signs throughout his film so that whenever the action or horror threatens to get too intense or the audience too involved with the film, the plot quickly calls for another few minutes of talk, talk, talk. Phans who see this sad excuse for a horror film are advised to rent the original ELM STREET film and view it with this in mind -- they may be surprised and saddened to see how tightly focused that film was, how little of the film's time and plot is wasted on needless exposition, and how much more frightening Freddy is because the film forgoes having a plot that does not directly involve him. When we're not with the kids in their dreams, we're in the real world where all their efforts to get an adult to believe them fall on deaf ears. The more they fail and the more Freddy succeeds at wiping out the entire group of Elm Street kids, the more the suspense and terror in the film builds; sadly, this is in marked contrast to the pacing and plot of THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS, which limp along to an extremely phony climax long after everyone in the audience has lost interest.
This is not to say that a horror film can't having all the trappings of a "movie of the week"; after all, THE STEPFATHER is an excellent example of how a filmmaker can logically extend the endless "brother against brother", "father against son", "mother against daughter", "father against mother" movie "specials" that fill the networks' after-dinner schedules. But it's not a simple thing to do, and a filmmaker who sets out to create a film like THE STEPFATHER would be well-advised to heed the reasons that that film was a success: excellent acting; a thoughtful script; and tight direction -- three of the things that THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS unfortunately lacks.
Horror films with unlikely premises can certainly succeed, and if more care had been taken with THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS, it's unlikely that anyone would notice or criticize its many logical flaws. But since the film is so badly done, so ineptly plotted, and so filled with scene after scene of people talking, talking, talking, none of it works, and the film's many flaws become all too apparent. You know you've seen a good horror film when you don't begin to wonder why the people in the film did all the crazy, dangerous things they did until long after the film has ended; likewise, you know you've seen a bad horror film when you start wondering that almost before the first killing. Let's just say that the Phantom spent so much of his time during the film wondering why nothing made any sense that by the time it was over he'd all but forgotten how promising the film seemed as the opening credits rolled.
Phans are well advised to steer clear of this turkey and hope that Wes Craven will do something to make up for it with his next film. One bright note until then: no one need worry about THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS II.
: The Phantom
: baumgart@esquire.dpw.com
: {cmcl2,uunet}!esquire!baumgart
.
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