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The People Under The Stairs (1991): 6/10
By the admittedly atrocious standards of every new-to-me Wes Craven movie I've watched this month, this comes across as a rousing success. That's not to mean it's especially
good, merely competent, and at least it attempts some deeper socio-political subtext than you'd expect from such a grisly genre exercise. A bizarre mixture of
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and
Home Alone, this is a film
very dated to the era in which it was released, where the tribulations of African-Americans of limited means was used as grist for a spree of inner-city crime dramas and schlocky horror films. This one lacks the elegance and dread of something truly ambitious like
Candyman, or the crackling, cat & mouse suspense of something like
Trespass, but -- some awkward shifts in tone aside -- it is at least well-crafted, and has some memorably eccentric touches.
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Vampire In Brooklyn (1995): 1/10
This, however, is straight-up swill, wasting the talents of not only Craven but that of Eddie Murphy (at the nadir of his early-90's career slump), portraying a suave, ladykiller of a vamp who has just arrived in New York looking for the reincarnation of his lost love (oh,
that moldy oldie...), who appears to him in the form of an NYC detective (Angela Bassett, too good for this material) who he's aching to sink his teeth into. An unholy mess of unfunny comedy and anemic blood-bag effects, this is absolutely painful to sit through, Murphy riffing away in a void while Craven is stuck directing traffic. It's interesting to note that both Murphy and Craven had their "comeback" projects come out a year later...Murphy with
The Nutty Professor and Craven with
Scream. Good thing, too, because this would have been a career-killer otherwise. On the plus side, Bassett looks stunning, and J. Peter Robinson's score is fine, but otherwise, this is about as entertaining as watching a blank screen for 100 minutes.
Even the two Nightmare On Elm St. movies he directed aren't the best of the franchise (the third one was the best, and Craven just wrote the original draft of the screenplay before director Chuck Russell and Frank Darabont re-wrote it). I like the second and fourth Scream sequels (the third was a slapsticky mess), The Serpent & The Rainbow was eerie and effective, and Red Eye was a lean thriller, but...Cursed? My Soul To Take? Shocker? At least John Carpenter had a good, solid decade's worth of films (from Assault On Precinct 13 in 1976 to Big Trouble In Little China in '86) before his slow, steady decline into mediocrity in the late 80's and throughout the 90's...with Craven, even his success stories seem to have been fluky accidents. Yeah, he created Freddy Krueger, but the first film is only sort of okay once you get past the admittedly-innovative premise (compare to the first Halloween, for example...the characters were more likable, the filmmaking more elegant, and the suspense more sustained), and the sequels are a mixed bag at best. And while Craven was at the helm for all of the Scream sequels, the series got mired down in trying to replicate the snarky, meta jokiness of Williamson's script for the original (the third is like an R-rated Scooby-Doo episode), and none of the sequels ever had a sequence as good and scary as the opening of the original. Like, it sucks that Craven died, and I respect him for launching two of the most iconic horror movie villains, but he was never "all that" as a director.
