Director Wes Craven is trying to do several things with this film, but they don’t really mesh that well. He’s trying to tell a modern fairy tale/legend as well as mixing horror with comedy.
Fool (Brandon Quintin Adams, MOONWALKER) is a young black boy, living in the worst ghetto imaginable. His family is about to be evicted and his sister’s boyfriend Leroy (Ving Rhames, PULP FICTION) decides to get even with the landlords and rob them of their gold coin collection. Leroy enlists Fool to help. However, little do they know, the landlords Mom (Wendy Robie, TWIN PEAKS) and Dad (Everett McGill, TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME) are insane.
The evil couple are searching for the perfect children, who don’t speak, see or hear any evil. Their daughter Alice (A.J. Langer, MEET THE DEEDLES) is kept prisoner in the house. When the boy children turn bad, they are kept in the basement and fed human flesh. However, one named Roach (Sean Whalen, TWISTER) gets out and lives in the walls of the house. Fool’s mission becomes escaping the house alive and saving Alice.
Every neighborhood has it’s own urban legend about the house you just don’t go up to. The film invokes dark fairy tale themes like those in HANSEL & GRETEL and epic damsel in distress legends. At this level it works. There’s also something extra scary about horror films that star children. I think it taps into innate fears that everyone has as a child as well as tapping into an inherent vulnerability.
But where the film goes awry is with its humor. It’s campy, which really marginalizes the scary moments. Horror/comedy is really tough to pull off. This film is too interested in making Mom and Dad a geek show family like the one in TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, but there often just a joke, getting thwarted by the children left and right. Horror with a bit of comedy works best when it’s satirical or spoofy like in EVIL DEAD II, SCREAM or DEAD ALIVE. The humor in Craven’s NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET works better than here, because its dry wit and makes Freddy more menacing not less like the silliness does with the parents in PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS. By the end of the film, I was rolling my eyes at how stupid Mom and Dad were. I never once thought the kids were in real danger and just kept thinking about how the screenplay was going to write them out of whatever new predicament they were in.
There are a lot of interesting elements here, but they never make a solid whole and the comedy undermines everything that does work.
Rick DeMott
Animation World Network
Creator of Rick's Flicks Picks
