Overall: D
Acting: D
Writing: D-
Story: D+
Technical
aspects: D+
Effects: D
Directed by:
Glen Baisley
Starring:
Joe Lauria
Michael Gingold
C. J. DiMarsico
John Studol
Mike Lane
Ed Shelinsky
Danielle Russo
Particular trigger warnings: sexual assault, animal cruelty,
prostitution, hard drug use
Passes the Bechdel test? I don’t think so
I basically give a synopsis below, because it’s
hard to pick apart otherwise. Beware of spoilers all the way through.
The Tenement is a series of four
loosely related stories about different occupants of the same tenement house.
The movie starts with a man named
Ethan (Pete Barker) speaking to the owner of the building (Jude Pucillo.) Ethan
says that he used to live there forty years ago, and he wants to know if the
new owner has seen the building do anything strange to the people living there.
Ethan begins to reminisce about the time he lived there.
We suddenly cut to a scene of a
girl being kidnapped and crucified as part of a cultic ritual, but we soon find
out that this is just a crappy movie within our crappy movie, as this is part
of Ethan’s memory. It’s 1980 and Ethan (Joe Lauria) lives in his apartment with
his bedridden mother (Doreen Valdati) and spends his time either at work or at
home watching horror films by director Winston Korman (Michael Gingold), whom
he idolizes. Well, Korman is in town casting for a new film, and Ethan is paid
to deliver black roses to him. He gets mistaken for a prospective actor, but
when he can’t act and freezes up, Korman laughs at him and mocks him until he
runs away. Ethan goes home, kills his cat, and then leaves his
overbearing mother. He dresses all in black, and goes to Korman’s house. Korman
is outside, doing all he possibly can to prove even further that he is a
caricature of a douchebag and we Should Not Like Him. After an awkward chase
scene, Ethan kills Korman with a shovel, dropping a black rose on the body,
becoming the “black rose killer.”
The
second story happens in 1990, and focuses on a young mute girl (mute apparently
due to something traumatic in her past, though this isn’t expanded on) named
Sarah Weston (C.J. DiMarsico). She spends her time waltzing alone to music from
her radio. A neighbor named Henry Wallace (John Studol) keeps watching her,
prompting her parents to take her away on a vacation for a while. They leave
her alone for a while, and Wallace breaks in and sexually assaults her. She
fights back, but he keeps overpowering her. In the midst of the rape, he
suddenly blacks out and appears to be hallucinating and recalling trauma from
his own childhood. He wakes back up in the living room, with Sarah gone. He
finds her in the bedroom, and approaches her, but she turns up her radio, he
starts screaming and holding his head, and then he disappears. Later on, with
the Weston family back at home, Sarah is seen dancing in her room, but the
shadows and mirror show that she’s dancing with some sort of creature.
The
third story jumps forward nine years to 1999, and is about Jimmy (Mike Lane),
who has begun attending a therapy group to help him deal with his relatively
unspecified issues. He appears to mostly just be a shut-in. On his way home,
he’s attacked by a wild animal (and by wild animal, I mean a husky that just
kind of happily trotted behind him for about three seconds.) He’s bitten on the
arm, and he slowly starts becoming convinced that he’s turning into a werewolf.
He thinks the symptoms are obvious, though no one else sees the transformation.
He kills his friendly neighbor who apparently had a thing for him, he kills a male
prostitute, and then he kills a female dancer in a strip club. Here he’s
apprehended, and sentenced to life in a mental hospital. But then he’s attacked
by some apparently “real” werewolves, who want to kill him for bringing too
much attention to them.
The
fourth story happens in 2000 and is about another serial killer (Ed Shelinsky)
living in the tenement, who pretends to be a taxi driver to pick up women and
then torture and murder them. We see him capture and kill a prostitute, and
then go out “hunting” again. This time he picks up a girl (who I can’t remember
being named, but I believe is being played by Danielle Russo.) She has him take
her out to the place where Winston Korman, the horror director from before,
used to film his movies. She has to give him directions, but she says she’ll
just go in for a second to get money for the cab fare. When the taxi killer
follows her in and attacks her, she says she “likes it rough” and attacks him
back, saying it was obvious he wasn’t a real taxi driver because he didn’t know
the place she wanted him to take her, and the two fight some more. Apparently
they realize that they’re soul mates or something, and the two make out. Then
we see that they’ve joined forces and are killing people together. Aww.
The
movie closes with the elderly Ethan and the owner discussing that they have
seen the house do strange things to people. Ethan lays a black rose on a nearby
bench. The owner (who by this point I was calling “goth Fabio”) confronts Simon
(Chris Alo) the local pimp and drug dealer, telling him to stop hanging around
and selling all he sells in front of the building. Simon pretty much blows him
off before hallucinating madly about drug use and overdosing and what the fuck
ever, while the owner stands nearby, leering at him, obviously the cause. The
end.
This movie was pretty bad. One of
the reviews on the case says that it “certainly shows an affinity for the
genre” and we remarked that that seemed like a backhanded compliment. And that
really feels like the nicest thing I can say about it, too. It’s clear that the
makers really like horror films, and it seems like they probably even really
enjoyed making this movie, but I certainly can’t say that it was very good.
According to something else I found online, the director, Glen Baisley, was a
sexploitation film director in the 60s and 70s, and then filmed porn for a
while, before coming back to horror films, and I guess I wouldn’t have a hard
time believing it. (And the “Walter Korman” film we get to see a brief snippet
of during the first story is a perfect sexploitation/horror, to the point I
wonder if it was a clip from something the director did in the past.)
My problems with the movie are
varied. The acting was generally really substandard. Some actors were fine, but
some side characters delivered their lines so badly it sounded like they were
reading them off for the first time, and at other times it was obvious they
couldn’t remember their lines correctly.
The stories themselves just weren’t
that well-told in my opinion either. The first one, it sounds like all the
dialogue between Ethan and his mother was lifted from Willard (which is a much better film.) They refuse to show
the mother for a while, and I wondered if it was going for the Psycho-style twist, though apparently that was just a
deliberate allusion. It reminded me more of Willard, anyway, down to the tone and pitch of the mother’s
voice. Plus there were the weird dangling plot threads like Ethan's hallucination-girlfriend. The fourth story just bored me more than anything else; it was too
bloodless to really be shocking the way it seemed to be aiming for, and it just
managed to leave no real impression. The second and third had at least glimmers
of interest for me. I want to know more about Sarah and the thing she was
dancing with. Does she have strange powers? Is she allied to some kind of demon
that killed her attacker? Is the creature a personification of the “monster”
she killed? And the third story, while (probably deliberately) ridiculously
silly, at least has a twist that could be interesting in a better film; the
idea that someone who pretends to be some kind of monster is killed by the real
thing.
As far as the anthology goes,
judging from the title and the prologue/epilogue frame story, we’re apparently
supposed to think that the building is somehow compelling people to become violent
or is giving them delusions and apparently occasionally psychic powers. But
without the occasional exterior shots of the tenement house, there’s nothing
that tells me that these people supposedly live in the same building; none of
them meet each other, there aren’t any other ties between the characters or
stories (aside from Gordon Korman being mentioned in two stories, and Ethan
being a character in one story and the frame,) there aren’t any other clues to
the setting. There’s also never any reason given for why the building would
have this effect on people. It really comes off as just being the most tenuous
possible way to connect four ideas that couldn’t quite be films on their own.
And despite all the stories being relatively short, averaging in the 20-30
minute range each, the film drags.
The entire time we’re skipping
around from the 80s onward never felt convincing to me either – there was never
anything that made me believe we’d changed time periods. Hairstyles, clothing,
technology, etc. all remained so constant that it was hard to feel that this
was somewhere in the past, or that years were passing between the stories. And
Ethan, supposedly our “tie” between the past and the present of the building,
appears to have aged about fifty years since 1980, so either their math is bad,
or the frame story is set in the future.
The effects are nothing great.
Fights don’t look at all convincing, with it often being incredibly obvious
that there’s no force behind any of the blows. The movie doesn’t overly rely on
gore effects and the like, which to me is a point in its favor, since the blood
effects they have aren’t that good. Some of the scenes ended up prompting
laughter when it wasn’t intentionally funny.
Pretty much everything from the
acting to the effects to the scenarios just feel completely unconvincing. And allegedly this is part one of a trilogy… I’m not sure how to justify continuing
this through two more films.
