There certain names in the film industry that just get hyped beyond reason, and sometimes I just don't understand why. Wes Craven is probably the perfect example of this. "A Nightmare On Elm Street" was lame and "The Last House On The Left" was weak and ridiculously poorly made. But "The People Under The Stairs" just took Craven to a new level of putrid, wretched tripe.
Now don't start rolling your eyes and saying "Oh god, another horror-hating elitist.", I am a huge fan of the genre. But Craven's films are just plain awful, especially this one.
The story is about a young African-American boy who lives in the ghetto with his large family and ill mother. They have insurmountable money problems and their apartment is being foreclosed on by greedy landlords who want to tear it down and erect an office building. The boy's older sister has a thieving, jive-talking boyfriend who tells the boy that he knows where the landlords live and that they have a stock-pile of a golden coins that will solve all of their money problems several times over. But what makes the boy nervous is the fact that the landlords are the people everyone in the neighborhood considers crazy, and their house is the one children cross the street to stay away from. Once inside, the boy encounters unspeakable horrors as the psychotic landlords try to track him down and keep him away from their sheltered, untouched daughter.
The film is bursting at the seams with racial stereotypes, horror clichés, poor acting, atrocious writing, and every form of inane stupidity you can imagine. The overly cheap score doesn't really help either.
If you're looking to get into horror films, stay hell the away from Wes Craven and stick to someone who knows what they're doing, like George A. Romero or Lucio Fulci. If you're looking for a fun adventure film, check out something like "The Goonies" or "Raiders of the Lost Ark". Just make sure you avoid this heap of garbage at all costs.
.5/10
Your father's one sick mother. Actually, your mother is one sick mother too.
The People Under The Stairs was actually a little better than I had expected. I saw this film on sale at Wal-Mart for practically nothing. So I got it. I mean We Craven is the director and the plot didn't sound too bad. The People Under The Stairs is not bad, but it's more like a late Friday night horror film. I wouldn't spend my day watching it beacuse it's more effective at night also. The premise of the film is okay. It held my attention and offered up a few creepy moments. The direction is great. Craven proves once again that he knows how to pull his audiences' strings. The acting isn't that great. It's actually kind of bad. Ving Rhames is probably the best in show. I also thought that Wendy Robie portrayed her character credited as "Mom" well. She was kind of creepy. The score for the film didn't really seem present. I actually don't remember it that well. Overall The People Under The Stairs amounts to a decent late night horror film. The plot is semi-interesting while Craven's direction keeps you at the edge of your seat. If for no less see it for Wendy Robie's creepy character.
Wes Craven's best movie
After that disaster called "Shocker", Wes Craven directs this darkly humorous suburban dark horror-comedy. A boy living in the ghetto needs tons of money to help his sick mother and he gets his uncle and his uncle's friend to help him steal money hidden under the stairs of their landlords house and soon he discovers that the couple keep people under their house. A very well-made horror flick from the 90s with a good cast,good director, and a well-written storyline. The atmosphere and the house are equally creepy and the couple of the household are bizarre. One of Wes Craven's best movie.
The classic teen novel of adolescent torment and forbidden love gets brought to the screen. When the father of four beautiful blond children is suddenly killed, their mother (Victoria Tennant, L.A. Story) takes them to the family home she fled 17 years earlier. Their fierce and frightening grandmother (Louise Fletcher, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest) locks them in an upstairs room, from which the only escape is into the cluttered and cobwebbed attic. The children's isolation gets more and more extreme as their mother abandons them, finally even slowly poisoning them to gain her father's inheritance. Sadly, the movie shies away from what made Flowers in the Attic such a hugely popular book--namely, the incestuous sex that began between the two older children, Cathy... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Louise Fletcher - Victoria Tennant - Kristy Swanson Director(s): Jeffrey Bloom DVD Release Date: Released the 24 April 2001 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Wes Craven's horror pictures always have a few wild ideas knocking around inside them, and this 1989 slashfest is no exception. The electrocution of a mass murderer turns into a kind of cosmic jump-start: evil Horace Pinker is reborn as an elusive electronic phantom, capable of leaping from one body to another. (This trick is also used to good effect in The Hidden and Fallen.) Pinker's a stinker, and Craven was clearly trying to set up another franchise villain in the vein of his Nightmare on Elm Street champ, Freddy Krueger--perhaps a bit too baldly. However, amidst the mayhem, the film's real subject is the poisonous presence of mass media, as Pinker (played by The X-Files' Mitch Pileggi) insinuates himself as a free-floating spirit run amok in television... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Mitch Pileggi - Michael Murphy Director(s): Wes Craven DVD Release Date: Released the 02 September 2003 Usually ships within 24 hours
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Saw opens with a gruesome scenario: Two men are chained to the walls of a grimy bathroom with a bloody corpse lying on the floor between them. Tape recordings tell them that one of the men has to kill the other, or his wife and child will die. The corpse is holding a gun in one hand, but it's out of reach...but whoever has locked these two up has thoughtfully provided a hacksaw that can't cut through the heavy chain, but might cut through a little flesh and bone. From there, Saw jumps back and forth as the two men slowly unravel how they know each other and that their tormentor is one of those all-knowing, all-capable serial killers (it goes without saying that Saw is hugely influenced by Seven and the movies of Dario Argento), a fellow known as Jigsaw who... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Leigh Whannell - Cary Elwes - Danny Glover Director(s): James Wan DVD Release Date: Released the 15 February 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Corey Haim (back when he was still cute) and his souped-up hot-rod of a wheelchair are all that stand between a sleepy little New England town and a ferocious full-moon killer in Stephen King's adaptation of his novella Cycle of the Werewolf. This minor entry into the werewolf canon lacks the scares and sense of humor of superior hirsute thrillers The Howling and An American Werewolf in London, but pays off in some nice casting touches. Gary Busey is loyal to the end as Haim's beer-guzzling Uncle Red, Twin Peaks's Everett McGill cuts an unsettling figure as the town minister, and fleshy B-movie icon Lawrence Tierney (Reservoir Dogs) is the gruff bartender who breaks up bar fights with a baseball bat called "The Peacemaker." The monstrous wolf beast, a... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Gary Busey - Everett McGill Director(s): Daniel Attias DVD Release Date: Released the 28 May 2002 Usually ships in 24 hours
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This 1987 thriller was a predictable hit with the teen audience it worked overtime to attract. Like most of director Joel Schumacher's films, it's conspicuously designed to push the right marketing and demographic buttons, and granted, there's some pretty cool stuff going on here and there. Take Kiefer Sutherland, for instance. In Stand by Me he played a memorable bully, but here he goes one step further as a memorable bully vampire who leads a tribe of teenage vampires on their nocturnal spree of bloodsucking havoc. Jason Patric plays the new guy in town, who quickly attracts a lovely girlfriend (Jami Gertz), only to find that she might be recruiting him into the vampire fold. The movie gets sillier as it goes along, and resorts to a routine action-movie showdown, but it's... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Jason Patric - Corey Haim Director(s): Joel Schumacher DVD Release Date: Released the 27 January 1998 Usually ships in 24 hours
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