The People Under the Stairs

Do I have a strange one for you, today...

I recently decided I was going to start watching the alleged 100 greatest horror movies of all time. I figured it'd be simple enough considering I'd already seen about half of them. The movie was listed as number 97 was The People Under the Stairs. Now, I've seen some weird movies in my day.

Pic related

And while I can't say that this takes the cake, it's certainly up there. Oh, yeah, I'm going to ruin this whole movie in the process, but trust me, you're not going to care. The movie starts by showing us a very bad neighborhood that is being crushed under it's heavy landlord taxation. The main character, "Fool" as he's called, lives here.

Fool.

Pretty early into the film we're introduced to the landlords, the Robesons who are only referred to otherwise as Daddy and Mommy. They seem like pretty bad people at first, but aw hell, you have no idea until the movie starts going.

So anyway, Fool and two other guys, Leroy and Spenser get in a car and drive to these asshole's house to give them a piece of their mind. They turn Leroy away immediately but Spenser gets in. Soon after Fool and Leroy see the Robesons leaving so Leroy breaks in. Fool ventures off into the basement which looks more like a masochists dungeon, finds Spenser dead on the floor and a whole bunch of zombie like people running around. The Robesons come home and Daddy shoots Leroy while Fool takes to the labyrinth-like walls. This may be a good time to point out that Daddy wears full dominatrix a lot.

And no, they don't say anything about it.

So, Fool meets the Robeson's daughter, Alice, who is boarder-line tortured by Mommy and Daddy. There's a scene where Mommy throws her into a scalding hot bath and whatever... I don't really even know why they bother with a kid. Well, she tells him that those freaky zombies are just Mommy and Daddy's bad kids who have resorted to cannibalism. Alice avoided that fate by following all the rules. Well, eventually Fool has to run again and he meets the escapee, Roach, who is a kid who had his tongue cut out.

He looks like this.

He makes absurd moaning sounds all the time. It makes me feel like a bad person for laughing.

Well, Daddy sics the dog on Fool and yadda yadda. Fool eventually manages to escape the house by jumping from the attic to the pond, but Alice is left behind so he promises to return. When he gets home, his grandfather tells him about how Mommy and Daddy are actually siblings with benefits. Which I guess explains the (ahem) "special" children of theirs. When Fool comes back Alice tells him that now the pond is drained and filled with glass, passageways have been closed off, and the house is wired to explode. Y'know, normal shit.

Fool gets captured and tied in the basement. Daddy has some, fucked up acid pit or something that he throws dead bodies into. We get to watch him, I don't know what he's doing, gutting Leroy or something? Daddy eats some scraps off of him before dropping him into the acid pit. Fool manages to escape and whatnot and gets chased around by Daddy who corners him but is saved by the doorbell (see what I did there?). Daddy opens the door and it's the ghetto people bitching about the crushing rent and shit like that.

Turns out, they all had AIDS as well.

Fool runs back to the basement where he is guided by The People Under the Stairs into a vault with shit tons of money and shit tons of dynamite. Meanwhile in the kitchen, Alice stabs the hell out of Mommy, slits her throat and The People Under the Stairs EAT HER. Awesome.

Daddy corners Fool again but Fool hits the dynamite switch and Daddy is blown back into the acid pit and dies by one of the more preferable methods...

Money goes errywhere and all the ghetto people rejoice. The end.

This summarization doesn't do it justice, it's just an odd, odd movie. I think one of the reasons I find it so strange is because it was made by a mainstream horror director, the legendary Wes Craven, famous for movies such as Scream and The Last House On the Left. I also find it strange that it was listed as one of the greatest horror movies of all time. Who the hell thought that made sense? The acting is bad, the plot is wut. The whole movie just gives me a weird feeling in my stomach, I don't know what it is...

I guess if you want a horror movie that's different, and I mean different, The People Under the Stairs is the movie for you.

4/10 - You Might Like it, But Only if You're Into Some Weird Shit (Probably Not).