No wonder there's no money in the ghetto!
In the interest of decompressing after such an intense documentary, I moved on to Wes Craven's 1991 film The People Under the Stairs, which I thought I was revisiting, but apparently I only ever saw bits and pieces of it on television. Watching it from the beginning for the first time, I was struck by the parallels with Let the Fire Burn, starting with its 13-year-old protagonist, Fool (Brandon Adams), whose real name is Poindexter, but no one calls him that. With his family on the verge of being evicted from their home in the ghetto, Fool teams up with a pair of thieves -- Ving Rhames's "treasure map"-bearing Leroy and his white accomplice -- who plan to rob their despicable landlords, a creepy brother/sister act played by Everett McGill and Wendy Robie (then best-known for playing a cracked couple on TV's Twin Peaks) who call each other "Mommy" and "Daddy" and are the mentally unbalanced embodiment of the Religious Right. (McGill is even made up to look a bit like Ronald Reagan, which cannot have been a coincidence.)
Not only do the Man and the Woman (as they're listed in the credits) prey on the vulnerable members of society, putting them out on the street the moment they get even the slightest bit behind on their rent, the couple also routinely kidnaps children and raises them as their own, meting out horrific punishments when they fail to conform to their strict religious principles. (Their de facto catchphrase: "May they burn in Hell.") When we meet them, they're doting on their "daughter" Alice (A.J. Langer), who has never been outside their fortress of a house and has yet to do anything to displease them too terribly. There's a horde of mutilated, pale-skinned teenage boys, though, that are kept locked in the basement and who seem to subsist solely on human flesh (which also gets fed to their vicious guard dog, Prince). The lone exception is Roach (Sean Whalen), who has somehow escaped into the walls and has the run of the house (which the Man and the Woman have booby-trapped and riddled with secret passageways). As the film progresses, the Man and Woman become more and more cartoonish in their villainy, with McGill really getting into the scenes where he dons a studded leather bondage suit to go hunting. And, eerily echoing Let the Fire Burn, the whole shebang ends with their house getting blown to smithereens, their ill-gotten gains being distributed among the families they've bilked over the years. In this case, though, the onlookers get to keep their homes instead of seeing them go up in flames.