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FILM:


V/H/S: Viral - 2014
see link for writing & directing credits

The V/H/S series combines two of the riskiest elements of horror -- found footage and anthology -- to what has generally added up to a more successful sum than one could reasonably expect.  The hungry young bucks of low-budget scares have by-and-large broken away from the hammy, winky traditions of EC Comics influenced shorts, and make a genuine effort to present their pieces with a certain amount of realism -- at least until they go completely batshit-outta-Hell.  The first two V/H/S films are kind of like an online personality test for horror fans.  Different shorts appeal to different fans, well, differently.  I, personally, didn't really care at all for the one in V/H/S 2 that was most lauded by the most self-righteous of horror fans

I, again personally, feel that this third installment is actually the best one yet, although I'm sure that won't be a unanimous opinion.  The narratives are better developed over all.  The visions are more unique.  And after the virtually cut-and-pasted framing device in V/H/S 2, the mythology finally evolves a little, in scope if not in clarity.  This V/H/S seems like it might actually be trying to say something.

The first film (not counting the framing story, to which I will return) is Dante The Great from director Gregg Bishop.  It's presented documentary-style, but plays fast and loose with the found footage premise when the action picks up.  The story is about a not-so-great wannabe magician who discovers a fabled cape capable of empowering real magic.  He rises rapidly through the ranks with tricks that no one else can fathom, but as his private collection of videos shows, there is a price to pay for that power.

Of all the segments in Viral, this is the one most capable of expansion into a full-length feature, and I imagine that Bishop must have considered it for that at one time.  Dante's career arc is glossed over, as is his relationship with Scarlett, his most recent assistant and potential rival.  Their battle for the cape is cool as hell and I easily could have watched 10 more minutes of that alone.  If Marvel Films hadn't already hired a director for Dr. Strange, this would be a stunning audition tape.  It really isn't scary, but then so little is.  It's clever and fun and showed me new things.  That's all I'm askin' for.

The next film is by far the strangest.  Parallel Monsters by Nacho Vigalondo is the video record of one man's secret experiments with a gateway intended to reach a parallel universe.  On this, his third effort, the gateway opens into a mirror image of his own basement laboratory.  Peeking through, he discovers a mirror image of himself.  They're both delighted by this breakthrough.  Neither one can restrain his curiosity, and they agree ("I was thinking the same thing!") to trade places for 15 minutes to see how the other side lives.

As it turns out, there are more differences than everything being a reflection.  Their cultures have some radically different bases, and then there's... that other thing.  After creeping along for a while, then getting weird and uncomfortable, this one suddenly stomps on the gas to get things over with in a way that didn't quite make sense and could have been much better paced.  However, once the Hell breaks loose, the viewer is more concerned with "WTF?!!" than the finer points of narrative pacing.  It's definitely a concept that could be expanded in another context, if it hadn't gotten into such a hurry to tie things up in a bloody little bow at the end.  There are definitely some surprises here, and I like the way it didn't feel obligated to answer every question it raised, simply allowing things to remain texture in the alternate dimension.

The third segment is the least developed and most over-long, which isn't to say that there's nothing to like about it.  Bonestorm by Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead is made of footage shot for a couple of skateboarders intent on becoming the next internet sensation, so much of it comes from GoPro cameras on their boards and helmets.  Between you and me, that isn't the best place for them.  A big chunk of the segment simply involves them falling off their boards, bitching at their videographer and getting chased out of public places.  Eventually they decide to head down to Tijuana to skate a drainage ditch (because they don't have drainage ditches in California?), so then we get footage of them wandering around TJ and finally finding a ditch to ride.  This ditch just happens to have all kinds of freaky witchcraft symbols and totems all over it.

Soon enough, one of the skaters spills a little blood on the symbol and as soon as it starts to smoke, the cultists show up and attack.  The skaters spend an awful lot of time killing cultists that might better have been spent getting the hell outta Dodge, but the cultists aren't done with them yet.  There really wasn't anything I'd strictly call a story here, just a series of events and a lot of filler.  There's some fun to be found in the skater dudes' characters and the final bouts of violence, but those both become as tiresome as the rest of it.  The thing I appreciated most about it was the way that its themes of internet fame and unearned ambition tied in with the wraparound story's.

Now, about that wraparound story; Vicious Circles directed by Marcel Sarmiento.  The first two V/H/S films essentially had the same framing device, where someone broke into a seemingly empty house and watched a series of weird videotapes (thus the name) about horrific stuff happening, then being eliminated one by one by unknown persons or dark powers.  Viral does evolve this concept, starting out with a modern internet-savvy couple who feel obligated to record far too much of their lives.  When a big ol' LA police chase hits their neighborhood, the guy heads out to try and get some footage of it, and in the process, his girlfriend disappears, evidently scooped up by the speeding ice cream truck leading the police in circles.

Between the other segments, the chase continues, reflected in footage from other sources where other incidents occur.  It seems that the truck is spreading madness in addition to mayhem.  While the narrative is distinctly less clear that the frame has been in the past, and the relationship to the segments more vague, I found it to be more artistically creative, and I believe it was actually trying to say something about the toxic power of our ubiquitous fame-chasing internet culture.  It certainly evolved the concept, taking the dark powers mobile, spreading the doom rather than merely luring others to it.

The VHS conceit had been beaten and abused in the past, given that many of the films acknowledged a digital recording context, but as Viral makes so much more of being digital and the nature of digital media, the VHS textures seem even more out of place.  I don't suppose a lot of people will notice or care, because those are much spookier textures that speak to something out of the past, but the talents involved in the next V/H/S would do themselves a favor to look at the way that a film like ETXR makes use of digital textures as they move forward.  The V/H/S title may become anachronistic, but that doesn't mean the film needs to be.  Perhaps the series becomes "Viral" from this point on.

And despite the internet nerd rage, I really hope that the series DOES go on.  This is a great format for letting a younger generation of low-budget horror directors try a few things out and stretch their wings.  I'm really curious to find out more about the entity behind the videos; certainly more than I ever have been about some mere franchised serial killer.  I think each entry shows the next round of directors places where they can challenge themselves and what kind of things just aren't cutting it like they were following Blair Witch.  As our cultural relationship with homemade video evolves, it makes sense that our cultural response to that should evolve as well.


Currently on Video On-Demand.  Opens in select theaters November 21.

Press Eject

The Houses October Built - 2014
see link for writing team
Directed by Bobby Roe

In 2011, Bobby Roe made a documentary about the changing face of Halloween scare houses in the (mostly Southern) United States.  This year, he turned that concept into a found footage film about pretty much the same thing.  He and his friends visit a series of haunted house attractions looking for "real" scares.  This has an additional fictional storyline about them seeking out an underground horror house that turns out to be a little TOO real for them.  Essentially, it's Blair Witch all over again, but with the South instead of the woods, annoying bickering and whining leading up to an unsurprising doom included.  When people say "Ugh, another found footage horror movie" this is what they're talking about.

Creatures of the Night

The primary linking element between these two movies should be instantly apparent, but it turns out that they have more in common than the titular professions involved...

FILM:


Dead Hooker in a Trunk - 2009
Written & Directed by Jen & Sylvia Soska

After the brilliance of the Soska sisters' American Mary and the crime against humanity that was See No Evil 2, I wanted to check out their ultra-low budget debut to see if I could figure out more of the equation.

One of the last lines in the movie is "I can't believe there aren't any repercussions for all the things we did."  That goes a long way toward describing what kind of movie Dead Hooker in a Trunk is.

While it's classified as "Horror" on IMDb, it struck me as much more of a dark comedy crime thriller, but that's essentially semantic.  Rather than making their movie despite a $2500 budget, they embraced the low budget, squeezing every penny out of it, and more.  Dead Hooker in a Trunk is all about DIY, both as an aesthetic and a value.  It is exactly the punk rock exploitation flick that it set out to be.

In addition to writing, directing and probably making sandwiches, Jen & Sylvia star as Geek & Badass, respectively.  That's not me calling characters by their type, as I am wont to do, but the Soskas naming all their main characters according to type.  While running errands with their friends Goody Two-Shoes & Junkie (after another hard night of partying for Badass and Junkie, natch) they all discover -- you guessed it -- a dead hooker in the trunk of their car.

The ordinary logic of human behavior does not apply in this film.  Badass refuses to go to the police because, frankly, she and Junkie can't remember much of the night before.  Even less logically, everyone else goes along with this, albeit some more begrudgingly than others.  What follows is a spastic black comedy of (t)errors.

The girls and guy (Goody Two-Shoes is a guy, just a really wussy, religiously inhibited one) have to evade horny cops, a perverted hotel manager, various drug dealers, a cowboy pimp and the real killer while they try to figure out what happened and what to do about it.  Geek loses an eye, Junkie loses an arm (stitched back on, it's surprisingly resilient), Goody Two-Shoes loses his lunch (repeatedly) and Badass loses her clothes.  Considering her role in making things much, much worse, Badass gets off pretty easy.  Despite discovering that they didn't kill the hooker (the first time anyway) they do kill several people, only most of whom tried to kill them first.  All things considered, there were very few repercussions for all the things that they did.  As Badass says after surprising everyone by being alive after a run-in with the real real killer, "Death can't kill me!"

I cannot in good conscience recommend Dead Hooker in a Trunk in a general sort of way, but I liked it for what it was.  This is very definitely niche viewing for fans of exploitation film.  It's a bleakly funny, no-budget wail of pure street fighting adrenaline.  Like a first live gig for a punk rock garage band, they probably could play it again the same way if they wanted to, but they played even the flat notes with total commitment.

Despite my disappointment with See No Evil 2 (if a dry-heaving sense of loathing can be classified as "disappointment"), DHIAT gives me hope that they will indeed redeem themselves one day.  It really highlights the importance of them writing their own material.  No amount of glitter could gild the turd that was the SNE2 script, and no absence of budget could still the primal scream that was Dead Hooker in a Trunk.

Call Girl of Cthulhu - 2014
Written by Jimmy George & Chris LaMartina
Directed by Chris LaMartina

If Dead Hooker in a Trunk was a no-budget homage to the grindhouse cinema of the 70s, then Call Girl of Cthulhu is a low-budget homage to the splatter features of the mid-80s that you'd never really hear about until you saw them at the VHS rental.  If you want to be negative about it, you could say that it's crude and gruesome, but if you want to have fun, you could say that it's hilarious and raunchy with a bounty of the things that you rented videos (or stayed up late watching cable) for in the 80s.

The film is remarkably generous in most everything that it has to offer.  It combines Lovecraft mythology with raunchy sex comedy and splatterrific practical effects, often at the same time.  It's filled with inside jokes for Lovecraft fans.  My personal favorite is the condom brand, Deep Ones, but real fans are apt to catch more than I did.  The humor is silly and will make your inner 12-year-old-staying-up-late giggle until your parents tell you guys to tone it down in there.  Where so many movies from back in the day had to be stingy with their effects budgets until the finale, Call Girl of Cthulhu is able to keep 'em coming at a furious pace, and it's packed with silly, gross and raunchy creatures and mutations.

The premise is that our protagonist, Carter is a 20-something artist so socially inept that he can barely even talk to the women he knows, much less make of the lovin' to one.  Then one day he runs into call girl Riley (R'lyeh to you, nerds) on the street and is instantly smitten.  He decides to hire her for a little help with a certain matter.  Meanwhile, a Cthulhu cult is searching for a prostitute with a very particular birthmark and killing off the ones who leave them disappointed.  I'll give you one guess who has the birthmark.

Meanwhile that same meanwhile, a small group is working to prevent the cult from getting exactly what they want, and they steal the sacred Necronomicon from the cultists.  Seeing Carter's work in the weekly indy paper, they go to him to copy the book so they can give a powerless decoy back to the cultists.

Carter is so timid that he can't seal the deal with Riley, and she, moved by his vulnerability and contrast to her usual customers, takes a shine to him as well.  They start dating, but once the cult catches up with her, she pushes him away to protect him from the terrible thing inside of her.  She doesn't push away her regular clients, and all sorts of horrors befall them.  Riley has become one big walking STD from Hell -- more or less literally.

Of course the big climax involves the birth of Cthulhu and the opening of a portal to wherever it is that portals open to in Lovecraft's world; Tentacle City, evidently.  It's gory and hideous and triumphant and doomed and NEVER NOT FUN.  Except for the one part that's a total bummer, but that's kind of what you sign up for with Lovecraft.

Cheesy?  Sure.  Corny?  What else?  Light on characterization?  Not as much as you might think.  Poorly acted?  Only where it's funnier that way.  Tacky?  Look, there are boob-eel monsters AND a mutant dick creature.  If you can't enjoy that, that's on you, my friend.

Between these two prostitute-themed low-budget throwbacks, I definitely preferred Call Girl of Cthulhu.  It's still a case of taste whether this is something you can be open to enjoying, but buy-in is much lower and the reward much higher for the willing viewer.  Unlike poor Riley, it delivers something you won't want to kill as soon as it wriggles free.

Houses of Pain

Unless you're paying stalker-like attention to my lonely little blog, you probably haven't noticed that this week's postings have had an unofficial theme that I call Homegrown Horror.  In the interest of cleaning house, so to speak, I'm going to hit and run on a few stupid home-based movies that it's my own damn fault for thinking they wouldn't be.

And yet, rich white people keep buying country houses

I'm just going to get this out of the way now because it applies to all 3 of the following movies.  It's just bad writing when the only back story that characters have -- indeed, the only character that characters have -- are the things that will suddenly become convenient to their survival when the unlikely and unpredictable happens to them.

Those creepy rednecks you ordered are here!

FILM:


The Last House on the Left - 2009
Written by Adam Alleca & Carl Ellsworth
based on the 1972 Film by Wes Craven
Directed by Dennis Iliadis

This is more or less a home invasion horror crossed with a straight-up revenge flick.  A photogenic, rich white family heads up to their lake house to get away from the pressures of being so damn pretty, but Mom remains a worrying fussbudget anyway.  Teen Daughter needs a break so heads into town to visit an old friend.  Nervous Mom continues to worry.  The girls cross paths with an escaped convict and his trashy family.  Teen Daughter gets raped.  Teen Daughter's Teen Friend gets murdered.  Teen Daughter runs away and dives into the lake, swimming for freedom.  She takes a bullet and is left for dead.

Whoa, that wine went straight to my head!

Trashy criminals stagger to the nearest house for help (car crashed in the girls' escape attempt) which just so happens to be photogenic rich white family's lake house.  They get patched up and once the rains starts, are invited to stay in the guest house despite Nervous Mom's misgivings.  Thanks to Teen Daughter's established swimming skills, she's able to limp home, except, you know, the swimming version of limping.  Thanks to Doctor Dad's skills, he's able to patch her up.  Nervous Mom and Doctor Dad kill off Escaped Convict's Trashy Family, except for his Soulful Teen Son who totally switches teams.  The Money Shots are Aaron "Jesse Pinkman" Paul getting his hand shredded in a garbage disposal and Garret "The dad on Raising Hope" Dillahunt gratuitously getting his head 'sploded in a microwave.  The End.

Particular Set of Skills: Teen Daughter's championship swimming.  Doctor Dad's doctoring.  Nervous Mom's mistrust.

Dumb.

I'm not saying I would...

It's a family affa-a-air, It's a family affair

The Loved Ones - 2009
Written & Directed by Sean Byrne

Out of curiosity, I looked up what the Australian equivalent of the word "redneck" might be, and evidently the most popular response is "bogan."  I mention this because, had The Loved Ones been made in America, it would have been set somewhere where the suburban verges on the rural (Texas, Indiana, West Penn, etc) and the villains would have been rednecks.  But it's a Australian film, so the key differences are the accents and that the Big Dance is called the "End of School Dance" rather than "The Prom."

The Loved Ones opens with Rocker Dude and his Dad getting into the car accident that will takes Dad's life.  While the events that will befall Rocker Dude six months later are unrelated to this event, it's entirely responsible for creating his Particular Set of Skills that come to bear later in the story.

Who knew Judas Priest could save your life one day?

Bam, six months later and without introduction, Odd Girl asks Rocker Dude to the Big Dance.  He declines, as he has plans to attend with Girlfriend.  Because Rocker Dude's Dad died, he's having emotional issues that he won't discuss (because dude), and channels his stifled feelings into cutting (with the rocker-appropriate razor blade necklace he wears) and going out to walk his dog and rock climb to have his feelings in an acceptably masculine way.  Then he's knocked unconscious by an out-of-focus man.  Fade to black.

I'm not sure why the movie bothers to hide the identity of his captor from us, since we don't know him yet and they go ahead and show us before Rocker Dude regains consciousness anyway.

Still less creepy than those Father/Daughter Purity Dances

These are details that are not understood by people who paint by numbers.  The captor is the Creepy Daddy of Odd Girl, and in addition to a date, he's brought her a new dress for her own very special End of School Dance.  Cue incestuous overtones.

Rocker Dude awakens at the Formica dinner table with Odd Girl, Creepy Daddy and what I can only assume is Mommy Who Tried to Leave and Got a Homemade Lobotomy for her Troubles; otherwise known as Bright Eyes.  Torture, torture, torture.  Incestuous overtone become incestuous overtures. 

It's a good thing that Rocker Dude has A) a high tolerance for pain brought about by cutting, and 2) a razor blade necklace.  Cuts ropes, fights back, shoves Creepy Daddy into cannibal pit of former victims before surprisingly conscious Odd Girl shoves him in too.

Have you guys seen The People Under the Stairs?

Subplot Cop shows up to open the cannibal pit before being added to it himself, giving Rocker Dude enough bodies to stack so he can get a handhold and pull himself out (remember the rock climbing?).  Rocker Dude and Girlfriend kill Odd Girl with Subplot Cop's car.  The End.

Playing mix and match with things you've seen in other horror movies is not strictly the same thing as having an original thought, and equipping a character with no more than he needs to survive your implausible situation isn't anything like good writing.

Particular Set of Skills: Rocker Dude's resistance to pain, rock climbing ability and razor blade necklace.  Girlfriend's knowledge of Odd Girl's invitation.  Subplot Cop's missing son.

Dumb.

We just HAD to choose the forest with Klieg lights...

Just hangin', how 'bout you?

Treehouse - 2014
Written by Alex Child & Miles Harrington
Directed by Michael Bartlett

In this Ozark-set survival horror, even the good guys are rednecks, which I guess makes the bad guys hillbillies.

After a teenage girl and her young brother are abducted from their home in a nearby town, the kids are sent home early from school and the big festival is canceled.  That won't stop Cool Brother and a reluctant Weenie Brother from setting off fireworks with friends deep enough in the woods to avoid attention.  When their friends don't show up, they decide to set them off anyway, illuminating a treehouse built high up in the trees, and clearly not a place for fun-loving childish hijinks.  In the treehouse, they discover the missing girl, hurt and exhausted.  Cool Brother takes off to find help while Weenie Brother stays to take care of Missing Girl.  Almost as soon as he's gone, he stops responding to his walkie-talkie.

I can't believe he made that hanging joke either.

When the walkie-talkie does finally chirp up, it's the friends who were late meeting them.  The snuffling and branch-rattling noises outside the treehouse disappear, and soon after the radio bleats with the sounds of their terror, only to fall silent again.  By morning's light, Weenie Brother and Missing Girl discover the bodies of Cool Brother's friends dangling from the trees and something watching them from nearby.  It could be aliens or bigfoots... bigfeet... Sasquatches, but really it's just hillbillies, because why else would you set a movie in the Ozarks if it's not going to be hillbillies?

The young 'uns sneak out under cover of the night and try to make their way out of the woods.  A close call with a bear trap convinces them to stay put until the sun comes up.  It turns out they've been spittin' distance from a house the whole time.

BBQ! SUPERSTAR! Who in the world do you think you are?

Seeking aid at the house reveals that it's the home of the same hillbillies who've been hunting them, complete with Dead Mama in the bed and the suggestion of inbreeding in their unglamorous physical appearance.  The house is scattered with Polaroids of them with various victims, including Cool Brother and Missing Kid.

Thanks to Weenie Brother's history with the now-deceased Redneck Soldier Daddy, he knows how to throw a knife and fire a gun, and doing so not only helps his to survive and escape Homicidal Hillbillies, but redeems him to the memory of his hard-assed and abusive father.  Lucky him.

Make sure to empty the clip!  There's another one coming!

After causing a sheriff's truck to swerve off the road, possibly fatally, Weenie Brother and Missing Girl become Weenie MAN and Missing WOMAN when they find they have access to a couple of semi-automatic rifles (Dear gun nuts, I don't give half a shit what they're really called. That ain't my kink, son).  They start spouting hyper-masculine non-sequiturs like they're John Mc-fucking-Clane and head off to exact some "Second Amendment Solutions" on the final Homicidal Hillbilly (who already has a sucking chest wound).  So make sure to arm up, America!  You never know when you might accidentally kill your rescuer.  The End.

Particular Set of Skills: Weenie Brother's knowledge of knife-throwing & shooting and his desperate desire to prove himself to his dead abusive father & dead protective brother.

Dumb.



I am officially done giving chances to these kinds of movies.

If Blood and Love Taste So Sweet

FILM:


Excision - 2012
Written & Directed by Richard Bates Jr.

Holy crap!

Excuse me, before I get going on the other aspects of the movie, I need to recognize one thing in particular.  Excision is a masterpiece of casting achievement.  Just brilliant.  We have former teenage porn star Traci Lords playing the prudish and religious controlling mother.  Ray Wise, perhaps best known as Laura Palmer's father (and killer) from Twin Peaks plays the high school principal disinterested in hearing about psychological excuses for behavior.  Malcolm McDowell, who came to prominence as the extreme teenage delinquent in A Clockwork Orange plays a teacher who doesn't suffer troublemakers.  The one that will really grab your attention is John Waters of... being John Waters ...as a pastor, but I think the one I love the most is Marlee Matlin as a school counselor... who can't hear.  Yeah, that's how dark the humor is here.  Now where was I?  Oh yes...

Holy crap!  What did I just see!?

Excision is a restrained examination of one girl's journey from "disturbed" to "Disturbed."  I'm sure it won't fulfill all viewers' expectations of what constitutes a "horror movie," but it's undeniably horrific, while at the same time imbued with a sense of humor so black and morbid that The Joker would stand up and applaud at the end.

Pauline (AnnaLynne McCord) is not your normal high school student.  That much is evident from the very first scene, in which she dreams of two selves; one erupting in blood and agony, and the other writhing in erotic delight over the sight.  Clearly not right.  She's an acne-and-cold-sore-pocked outcast at school, where her socially inept behavior and emotional detachment mark her as strange; as other.  It's natural that we empathize with her, although she continually reminds us that her reasoning is not well-adjusted.

At home, she fights with mother, more-or-less correctly assessing her as a bitch.  Mom has two daughters, and the younger, prettier, disease stricken one is "her heart," while Pauline is constantly reminded of what a frustration and disappointment she is.  Pauline is intelligent and full of wit, but a disinterested student.  She wants, more than anything, to become a surgeon, and her dreams of blood feature her in increasingly glamorous roles, where she has control and finds a satisfaction crosses into the sexual.

The early incident that establishes her character is her decision to lose her virginity to one of the popular boys -- or more specifically, the boyfriend of the popular girl whom Pauline despises.  She matter-of-factly tells him what she wants and gives him number.  Later, she inappropriately tells her sister of her intentions, and that she wants to be on her period when it happens.  Boys being stupid and incapable of turning down free nookie, he accepts.  Pauline directs the event with clinical detachment.  She has timed it correctly and experiences visions of blood and passion far more glamorous than the reality.  When she directs him downtown, he discovers just what's up and is appalled.  Dropping her off at home, he can't get away fast enough.  Later, rather than feeling shame, Pauline uses the event to humiliate both the popular boy and his popular girlfriend

Pauline's conflicts with others intensify, and most of the time, these appear, well, not necessarily reasonable, but understandable as teen behavior and film behavior.  She fights with her mother about church, school, the cotillion into which she's been forced, and really pretty much everything.  This doesn't seem SO strange to us until it is, perhaps, too late.  When the popular girls vandalize her house, Pauline attacks her nemesis, laying her out and bloodying her nose.  We want to take the side of the underdog, so we're much less offended by this counterstrike than her parents and the principal who expels her.  Maybe we shouldn't be so hasty.

After having been stuck with the-price-is-right counseling from her pastor for the last few years, Pauline pleads to see a legitimate psychiatrist, having diagnosed herself with borderline personality disorder and her parents finally relent. ...but will it be soon enough to avert disaster?

Excision is one of the more chilling and, I feel, credible cinematic examinations of the loss of sanity that I've ever seen.  It happens slowly, and it doesn't seem particularly crazy until it crosses the line in an irretrievable way.  Pauline is incredibly insightful and strikes as as the only one who really gets it in her world, and while the delusional dreams are startling, their influence on her reality is filtered through restraint.  Even when she "loses it," she does a very wrong thing for a very right reason, but that doesn't make it a sanely arrive-upon conclusion.

It's a slow burn that suddenly slips into a living nightmare, only it's less sudden than it seems.  Like a frog in boiling water, the doom is ever present but easily overlooked.  It seems purposeful that so many of the actors were cast against type.  More than merely being hilarious stunt castings, they reflect the conflict and inherent madness of the world that both ushers Pauline into her own world of madness, and fails to recognize it for what it is.  The message here is not to treat the mentally ill as weirdos, though that's how they might present to us, or pariahs, but to get the real professional help.

I expected something in the ballpark of American Mary and/or May from Excision, but what I found was something entirely itself, and in many ways much more honest.  A true nightmare.

Family Values

FILM:


The People Under the Stairs - 1991
Written & Directed by Wes Craven

Wes Craven was one of the definitive horror directors of the exploitative 70s and the slasher franchise 80s.  By the late 80s and early 90s, his work was seen to have fallen off, before he rehabilitated his image with the self-aware Scream series.  Nevertheless, right smack in the middle of his "off" period, he dropped one of his most clever films ever; The People Under the Stairs.

In literature, the role of the fool has often been the naif, the innocent who, through his unsophisticated but earnest behavior exposes the ridiculousness around him.  It was often a way to lambaste the idiots in power right under their noses, since those with narrow and literal views tend not to be attuned to metaphor.  Craven leaves little doubt about the lead character in The People Under the Stairs, naming him "Fool" (ne Poindexter) and placing him in the middle of an allegory about the culture war against an evolving America. Different moments express the way that that culture war applies to race, economics, gender and more.

Fool is a young black teen.  In fact, it's his thirteenth birthday.  His dream of becoming a doctor seems an impossible (albeit understandable) one, given his ailing mother and inner city circumstances.  Leroy, his sister's boyfriend takes advantage of Fool's desperation to recruit him for a little B&E work, targeted against the corrupt landlord who just served the family with eviction papers.  Fool's scouting proves inadequate (with him posing as an actual Scout), so their team leader gives it another try, posing as a meter reader.  When he doesn't return, and the lady of the house leaves it, Leroy insists that they head in to make sure they're not getting cheated out of their share of the booty.

What initially seemed suspicious becomes increasingly strange.  The house is filled with numerous security measures designed not simply to keep people out of the house, but to keep someone in as well.  While Leroy investigates upstairs, Fool checks out the basement.  As if it wasn't bad enough finding their partner dead on the floor, what had been strange noises within the house are now revealed to be, something or someone living penned up behind the walls of the basement.

When the homeowners return, it becomes a race for survival for Leroy and Fool.  Well, mostly Fool.

The house is a maze of secret passages, filled with hidden threats and allies.  Fool's size becomes an asset in negotiating all of the narrow spaces between walls as he hunts for a way out of the house.  The homeowners "Mommy" and "Daddy" (actually sister and brother) pursue Fool and his allies with furious outrage, firing blindly into the walls to kill them.  They're willing to tear their home apart to destroy their perceived invaders; never mind that they lured them there one way or another.  Sound like any tea parties you know?

I really don't want to summarize any more because there are so many unexpected twists and turns along the way.  It's far from the movie that I expected from the title or the descriptions that I've read.  Fool is a strong, intelligent and brave character who never resorts to horror film stupidity.  In the third act, he makes a choice that appears, well, foolhardy, but he is more brave and thoughtful in his approach than we're used to within genre conventions.

The People Under the Stairs was kind of a ballsy movie for Craven to make in 1991, but it would be an even ballsier one to make today, assuming he could get it made at all.  There was a trend toward "black" movies in the late 80s and early 90s, but those were most often from African American directors like Spike Lee, John Singleton and the Hughes Brothers.  While PUTS isn't strictly "black," it features black leads and deals with themes of social justice.  A big studio wouldn't touch that today unless they hid it in one of their smaller imprints.  If this opened wide in our current cultural climate, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the poor white victims at Fox News would experience psychosomatic stigmata from their sense of crucifixion over the inbred racist villains.

Without going into any more detail about the story (haven't we ALL had about enough of that?), some of the relevant metaphors I found were; the way the rich exploit the poor simply for the sake of having and hoarding wealth, the way religion controls women and girls for its own exploitation, the way that racists dehumanize blacks while dehumanizing themselves, the illusion of wealth as "Liberty" when it's the freeing of that wealth that creates true liberty, the way that America is divided into separate worlds within the same walls, how the rich prey upon the poor then discard them when they've used them up and how the poor are pitted against each other rather than going after their common enemy.  Those that find a way to live freely within the system have their dissent silenced.  That was after the first viewing.  There will certainly be future visits.

That being said, it's entirely possible to enjoy the film as a fun and tense nightmare adventure and that's how I recommend one approach it.  It may have more to say than most overt political satire, but it never forgets to prioritize the fast-paced survival horror.  As a study in film making, The People Under the Stairs feels like a product of its time, but as social commentary, it feels fresher and more necessary than ever.