We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
Cody talks Craven, Joe Bob, time travel, and Netflix.
THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS (1991)
There’s no doubt that the late Wes Craven was one of our great masters of horror, but he did make some weird movies on occasion. Sometimes he’d deliver an undisputed classic like The Hills Have Eyes, A Nightmare on Elm Street, or Scream. Then, sometimes you’d get a strange one like Deadly Friend, Shocker, or Vampire in Brooklyn. And let’s not forget the dog flashback in The Hills Have Eyes Part II. One of his oddities is the 1991 film The People Under the Stairs, a movie that, like Shocker, I watched multiple times when I was a kid... but also, like Shocker, isn’t really a movie that’s “for me.” I haven’t felt compelled to revisit it very much in recent decades, and when I do, it doesn’t do that much for me. That said, I do think it holds up better than the scatter-brained Shocker.
Craven could never be accused of being a superficial filmmaker with nothing to say. He gave deep thought to all of his projects, even the wild ones. Like A Nightmare on Elm Street, this film was inspired by a newspaper article he read in the late 1970s. While a respectable couple was away on vacation, neighbors saw someone breaking into their home. When the police arrived, they didn’t find any burglars inside – but they did find the couple’s children, who had been imprisoned in the house their entire lives. He was intrigued by the idea that people who seemed to be normal and well-behaved would be performing atrocities in their home, and that their neighbors had no idea what sort of depravity was going on in there.
So, he wrote a screenplay about a young boy named Poindexter, though his tarot-reading sister has given him the nickname Fool. His family is poor and facing eviction from their apartment in the ghetto, so Fool is roped into a robbery scheme by his sister’s friend Leroy and his criminal associate Spenser. They plan to break into the landlord’s mansion and steal an extremely valuable coin collection... But once they reach the mansion, they find that it’s a very strange place. The doors are electrified. The windows are covered with screens, padlocked from the outside. There’s a boy living in the walls. And a group of tortured cannibals locked in the basement.
The owners of the mansion are a bizarre pair of siblings. They call each other Mommy and Daddy, and they’ve been trying to adopt the perfect child. Boy children always disappoint them in some way. They see or overhear something they weren’t supposed to, or they talk back. So Daddy cuts out the bad parts and tosses them into the basement. One of them, called Roach, has managed to escape into the walls – and, with his Rottweiler Prince by his side, Daddy hunts him through the house, carrying a shotgun and wearing a leather bondage outfit. Only a girl child named Alice has managed to stay in Mommy and Daddy’s good graces, sort of, by not seeing, hearing, or speaking evil.
Leroy and Spenser are taken out of the picture early on, leaving Fool to try to find a way out of this seemingly inescapable house. At least he has the help of Alice and Roach – and when he learns just how twisted Mommy and Daddy are, he begins to feel sympathy for the people under the stairs as well.
The main children roles of Fool, Alice, and Roach went to Brandon Adams, A.J. Langer, and Sean Whalen, each of them turning in strong performances that make you care about their characters. (And, thanks to this movie and John Carpenter’s Escape from L.A., young Cody had a crush on the nine-years-older Langer in the ‘90s.)
Kelly Jo Minter of Summer School and A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child appears as Fool’s sister, Ruby, and Bill Cobbs as Grandpa Booker. Leroy is played by Ving Rhames, with Jeremy Roberts as his pal Spenser. If you were around when this movie was first released, you might have thought that was Dave Pirner from Soul Asylum as the lead person under the stairs, the character known as the Stairmaster. But it was actually Yan Birch. For Mommy and Daddy, Craven lifted two actors right out of the cast of Twin Peaks: Wendy Robie and Everett McGill. Their characters are so off-the-wall, they feel like Robie and McGill were still in David Lynch mode when they reported to this set.
The house used for the mansion exterior can be found in Los Angeles, but the interiors were all built on set, and Craven saw the interior as a representation of the human mind. The outside and the first floor seem normal, but the deeper you go, the stranger it gets. He also felt that the people under the stairs represented the thoughts of insane people (they try to contain them, but they rise through the cracks) and that the film was about a young generation liberating itself from the madness of a previous generation.
He brought his story to the screen with a specific type of insanity and dark humor that couldn’t be replicated. That’s commendable, but it’s also why The People Under the Stairs has never ranked highly for me. The unique vibe of the film, the humor, the over-the-top Mommy and Daddy characters, it’s all just a bit off-putting to me. I don’t enjoy the time I spend enveloped in this film’s atmosphere very much.
That said, it is a good movie. Inspired by a horrific real-life case and guided by a dream, Craven brought us a one-of-a-kind cult classic that only could have come from him.
HIS & HERS (2026)
Alice Feeney wrote the mystery thriller novel His & Hers, which writer William Oldroyd and showrunner Dee Johnson teamed up to turn into a six-episode limited series for the Netflix streaming service. Although the novel was set in England, this adaptation moves the setting to the United States – the Atlanta, Georgia area, to be exact – and stars Tessa Thompson as Anna Andrews, an Atlanta-based news reporter who heads back to her small home town of Dahlonega when she hears that a murder has been committed there.
The return to Dahlonega not only gives Anna the chance to spend some time with her senile mother Alice (Crystal Fox), it also brings her back into contact with her estranged husband, Jack (Jon Bernthal) – a local detective who happens to have been having an affair with the married woman who was murdered. A woman that Anna was friends with during their teens.
The investigation Anna, Jack, and new detective Priya Patel (Sunita Mani) carry out unearths some dark secrets... and along the way, the killer racks up more victims. All of them people who had connections to Anna’s youth.
His & Hers is an interesting show, although I’m not sure about the ending. I predicted one stage of the ending simply because I threw out a goofy idea that I thought seemed like something you’d see in a lesser Scream sequel... and then the show one-upped me by going even goofier with its final reveal!
I wasn’t entirely sold by the wrap-up, but getting there was a good, dark ride.
TIME AFTER TIME (1979) – hosted by Joe Bob Briggs on MonsterVision
Back on September 27, 1996, TNT gave legendary drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs a double feature of time travel movies to host on show MonsterVision, starting with writer/director Nicholas Meyer’s “H.G. Wells vs. Jack the Ripper” thriller Time After Time, which was based on a story author Karl Alexander – who also turned the idea into a novel – crafted with Steve Hayes. Of course, Joe Bob never just dives into introducing a movie, so first he spends some time complaining about people overusing the word “dysfunctional.” With that idea out of the way, he can finally start talking about Time After Time, which he considers to be one of the strangest movies ever made... and that’s why he kind of likes it. And “kind of” liking it results in him giving it a 3.5 rating out of a possible 4 stars.
The story begins in 1893 London, a time when the brutal killer known as Jack the Ripper was terrorizing the city. Author H.G. Wells (played by Malcolm McDowell) – a real-life person who wrote the likes of The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds in the years following this film’s setting – is throwing a dinner party to show off the time machine he has invented when the police show up in search of the Ripper. Turns out, his surgeon pal John Leslie Stevenson (David Warner) is the killer – and to avoid being apprehended, he steals Wells’ time machine and zaps himself into the future! Thankfully, the machine returns, empty, so Wells can follow his friend and try to bring him to justice.
Wells and Stevenson have arrived in November of 1979, at which time the time machine is on display at a museum in San Francisco. The future doesn’t turn out to be quite what Wells expected, as he thought social utopia was right around the corner. No more war, no crime, no poverty, and no disease, with everyone living on terms of perfect equality. He’s disappointed to see the realities of ‘79. On the other hand, Stevenson is overjoyed to find that humanity is still troubled and violent, and that he can continue carrying out his murders in the city.
Making his way around the city, knowing Stevenson would have to exchange his currency, Wells crosses paths with bank employee Amy Robbins (Mary Steenburgen) – who, oddly, develops an instant attraction to this strange, out-of-date fellow. While Wells continues following Stevenson’s trail, he and Amy embark on a relationship on the side. It does make sense that Wells would be hooking up with someone during his time in ‘79, as the guy was into “free love” and apparently quite a hound, but Amy’s attraction to him is questionable.
Meyer had dabbled in territory like this before, bringing two historical figures (the fictional Sherlock Holmes and the real-life Sigmund Freud) together in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, and would again, when he co-wrote Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and sent the crew of the Enterprise back in time to the 1980s, and he’s quite good at it. Time After Time has plenty of humorous moments where Wells tries to figure out how things work in 1979 – and his fish-out-of-water routine and relationship with Amy actually overshadows the thrills of the Jack the Ripper element.
During his hosting segments, Joe Bob praises the writing of the film and the basic concept, which is so appealing that it sounds like a must-see. He points out that people love to see the worst of their current reality reflected in time travel stories, is charmed by Mary Steenburgen, questions the logic of time travel (particularly time travel involving murder), and calls himself a nerd for enjoying the movie... even though he soon gets tired of all the cutesy scenes of Wells marveling at things that didn’t exist in his day, and complains that the movie gets too talky and drags in the middle. He also reveals that he is not a fan of Wells’ novels and considers them to be boring.
Time After Time may drag in the middle and be more of a time travel comedy than a thriller overall, but it's an entertaining movie that's worth a watch. Especially if you watch it with Joe Bob Briggs.
TIMESTALKERS (1987) – hosted by Joe Bob Briggs on MonsterVision
Before Joe Bob introduces the second half of the double feature, he gets a special delivery from Honey the Mail Girl: a letter that was sent, like many of the letters he receives, from a viewer in prison. This one complains that Motel Hell was shown too late on a different MonsterVision night, so the prisoners only got to see half of it before “lights out.” They hope it will be shown again sometime soon, in an earlier time slot.
Once Honey makes her exit, it’s time for some Timestalkers. This one was a TV movie that originally aired on CBS on March 10, 1987. William Devane stars as Scott McKenzie, a college history professor who has an intense interest in the Old West and theories on time travel. In the opening scene, his wife and son are killed in a shocking, fiery car crash... so, given that this is a time travel movie, you probably have a good idea how things are going to end up in the final scenes.
On the way there, life carries on and Scott continues expanding his collection of Old West items. While he’s attending the latest Old West memorabilia auction with his pal General Joe Brodsky (John Ratzenberger), we start seeing flashbacks to the Old West era in which a stranger gunslinger called Joseph Cole (Klaus Kinski) is said to be searching for another gunslinger, a man who carries a pair of .45s, and tends to cause trouble for (or kill) the people he crosses paths with on his search. Director Michael Schultz makes every flashback and flashforward a cool event because every time we go in or out of the scenes we see flashes of sparks going across the screen, accompanied by a sci-fi sound effect.
Scott’s new haul includes a picture that’s supposed to be from 1886, and in the background of the image is Cole, carrying a .357 Magnum from the 1980s. He either got ripped off, or he has photographic proof of a time traveler... And soon after, a time traveler enters his life. Georgia Crawford (Lauren Hutton) shows up, wanting to talk to him about time travel – and Scott will come to find out that she’s visiting him from the 26th century. She’s enlisting his help because Joseph Cole is a renegade scientist from her time who has, they’re eventually able to deduce, has gone back to 1886 to assassinate Matthew Crawford, an adviser to President Grover Cleveland – and a distant relative of both Georgia and her father, who tried to remove Cole from their time travel research project.
The story, scripted by Brian Clemens and based on a story by Ray Brown, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense if you try to think about it, so just let it wash over you and try to enjoy the mixture of time travel story and Old West scenes. Cole is looking for a certain gunslinger because legend says that he’ll thwart him from achieving his goal... and would you believe if I said that Scott might be that gunslinger?
Joe Bob isn't sure about the movie when it first gets started, but hopes that it might be just stupid enough to be good. It doesn't seem like it wins him over very much by the end, as he says that John Wayne would have wept to see how poor the climactic shootout is. Along the way, he points out that we only see happy families in movies before someone experiences a horrible death, mentions that Kinski's autobiography is a "nasty, nasty book," advises viewers to hit the mute button while the characters listen to the country song that was written about the gunslinger, asks why would Lauren Hutton would want to do this movie and kiss William Devane, and ponders how director Michael Schultz went from impressive stage work to Car Wash, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and The Last Dragon... and then this movie.
I enjoyed Timestalkers more than Joe Bob seemed to. It's not something special and I wouldn't want to watch it too often, but I would gladly watch it again someday. And that despite the fact that I always find Klaus Kinski to be extremely off-putting. The guy is just gross, no matter what he's doing. But Timestalkers is a fun, decent little time waster.
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