The Vagrant

The Vagrant works because Chris Walas, an effects artist by trade, understood exactly how far to push the practical grotesquery of Marshall Bell's title character while keeping the film's real target squarely on suburban yuppie anxiety rather than pure horror. Bill Paxton anchors the escalating paranoia with real comic conviction, playing Graham's unraveling as a specific kind of financial and social terror as much as a physical one. The film's satirical edge, a man literalizing his fear of debt and downward mobility into a squatter he can't legally evict, gives the comedy real bite underneath the gross-out set pieces. Michael Ironside's detective adds a straight-man menace that keeps the investigation subplot from feeling like filler between the comedy beats. It's an underseen 90s horror comedy that deserved a far better release and reputation than Mel Brooks's production ever managed to give it.