Review of The People Under the Stairs

Fool is a ghetto kid about to evicted who decides to break into the house of the greedy landlords and steal enough to pay the rent. Big mistake - the landlords turn out to be a loony-toon brother-and-sister act who live in a labyrinthine mansion and literally eat little boys for breakfast. Can Fool get out alive, rescue the imprisoned Alice and save his neighbourhood from the bulldozers ? This is a terrific film, one of Craven's best, and one of a handful of great little horror movies made in the late eighties / early nineties by Shep Gordon's Alive Films company. It works wonderfully on several different levels; it's basically a great horror-adventure film with lots of action and scares, but it's also a weird culture-clash drama, a mythic adventure with a princess to be freed and golden treasure at the end, and even a lefty citizens' rights story. It's gloriously all over the place. The cast are excellent, especially young Adams, who holds the movie squarely on his small shoulders, and McGill and Robie (who played husband and wife on the TV show Twin Peaks) as the thoroughly psychotic Mom and Dad. A great visceral movie with lots of horrible moments - Adams battles with the vicious rottweiler, McGill gleefully chewing bits of Rhames' corpse, the ominous piles of dead flies in the kitchen. The art direction is tremendous; the gigantic, gruesome Bad Place of a house is horrifically cavernous and foreboding, crammed full of crawlspaces, archaic plumbing, ghoulish brickdust and crumbling plasterboard. Full of intriguing ideas and sociological riffs (gun culture, S&M tendencies, incest, racism, class exploitation), this is a movie bursting at the seams with cinematic creativity. Brilliantly written and directed by Craven, this is a fine example of the rare breed of multi-layered movie I adore which is automatically derided by snooty film critics who want to keep entertaining films and intelligent films mutually exclusive - may they burn in hell !!