Tenement
(1985)
Director: Roberta
Findlay
Cast: Jorge Baqueiro, Mina Bern, Thomas Biscione
After living and working in this world for many years, I
still haven't been able to reach my absolutely, 100% perfect living
situation. I don't believe I have ever mentioned before what living
situation I would consider perfect for myself, so I will mention it
now. I would like to live the life of luxury. For starters, all I ask
is that I live in a humungous, fabulous, multi-room mansion. It would
have a high wall all around it so I could keep all the riff-raff (such
as those annoying grade school children selling stuff to raise money
for their school - what about all of the money your school already got
out of my tax dollars?) out of my reach. It would also have a gigantic
Olympic-sized swimming pool that would be indoor, since I don't
particularly like the idea of people seeing me close to undress.
Another gigantic room in the mansion would be a screening room where I
could screen movies on 35mm film (and yes, I would have a spare 70mm
projector for movies in that format.) I would also have another home
theater room, this one with a gigantic widescreen LCD television set, a
Blu-Ray player for Blu-Ray movies and to enhance regular DVDs, a soft
comfortable chair set in front of the television, and as many speakers
as possible hooked up all around me to give me the best audio
experience possible. As for the kitchen, I don't particularly care what
it's like, as long as the top chefs I would hire would be able to whip
up various tasty meals for me (you actually think I would still cook
for myself?), and that there would be a large freezer that I would be
able to stuff full of frozen pizzas.
I daydream about a lot of things, though I will admit
that this dream about living this kind of luxurious life is one of the
daydreams I drift to frequently when I'm in a daydreaming mood. If I
were to be asked why this is one of my dreams, I think I would probably
say it comes from having a lot of experiences where I was living in
places that were unsatisfying for various reasons. The first such
experience was when I was a child, and I had to share a room with my
older brother. Actually, I had no problems with that... until it was
time to go to sleep. Occasionally, my brother would breathe heavily
when asleep (or maybe I just had sensitive ears.) In any case, those
occasions made it hard to sleep, so I was glad when my parents
constructed a new bedroom for my brother. Years later, I moved out of
my parents' house and went to university. I roomed on campus for the
first year, and I was glad to get out of there, because (among other
things) the people in my building were obsessed with Star Trek: The
Next Generation, and whenever it was on TV, the TV lounge on every
floor of the building would be stuffed with students watching the show,
and with my tastes being different, I would have to go without TV or
sneak in another building to watch TV. Years later, out of university
and into the working world, I moved into a room in a house holding
several other tenants. It seemed like a good place at first, but I had
problems with the other tenants. They would hog the bathroom for
unbelievable amounts of time, and they would steal my food from the
refrigerator (I had to seal my pizza boxes with packing tape so they
would not steal any of my leftover slices.)
Now I live in the best place I have ever lived in. The
bachelor suite that I live in is pretty spacious, giving me enough room
to hold my incredibly large collection of rare movies. There's a
laundry room in the building, and there is a common room on the top floor that has computers with
high-speed Internet when I need to find something quickly, and its own
free video collection for tenants that got around to watching several
movies I had not got around to watching before, including the sleeper Eye
Of The Needle. I'm not saying that it is a perfect place to
live, however. Several months ago, the administrators of the building
put up a note on the community bulletin board that they spotted on the
security tapes a couple of people that had gotten into the building and
subsequently started to case the place - obviously drug addicts looking
to steal something for their habit. I made sure to keep my door locked
at all times from that point on, though I'm still a little worried.
There is a definite large criminal element (mostly at night) that hangs
around not far from my building. I sometimes wonder what they could do
if any more got the mind to get in, and I was especially thinking about
this possibility when I watched Tenement. The setting of
the movie, as you may have guessed, is in an urban area, the Bronx to
be exact. In the basement of one rundown apartment building, a gang has
set up headquarters. An annoyed tenant calls the police, who
subsequently come and arrest the gang. But finding no evidence to hold
the gang, the police let them go after several hours. The gang is angry
about the arrest, so angry that they decide not just to get the tenant
that called the police. The gang decides to go floor by floor and kill
every last tenant of the building over the course of the night.
I feel I should mention that my expectations for Tenement
were pretty high. I had heard several interesting things about it
during the years, such as the fact that the level of violence in the
movie had resulted in the movie being slapped with an X rating from the
MPAA. The reviews I read of the movie seemed to support that this was
some kind of ultraviolent classic (for example, one reviewer, quoted on
the back of the DVD box, stated "My hand went flailing for the remote
just to verify what I was witnessing by replaying the scene almost
instantly.") After watching Tenement, I wondered if I
had seen the same movie as those reviewers. Yes, there are a few scenes
of somewhat intense violence, but while I guess I can see why the movie
got an X rating (not just the fact that this was an independent movie),
I honestly didn't find the movie overall to be as jam-packed with
(intense) violence as those other reviewers did. Could it be because I
have seen so much cinematic violence in other movies that I have become
desensitized? Possibly. Anyway, I feel I should mention that even
though some of my expectations were kind of let down, I still found
Tenement to be pretty entertaining overall. That's not to say
that I didn't have some problems with it, and I will go into some of
these problems before I get to what works in the movie. The setup of
the movie is pretty poor, for one thing. The arrest of the gang
actually takes place in the movie's first few minutes, not giving us
any real time to introduce them and illustrate why they are such bad
guys that have supposedly been giving the tenants problems.
Around the eleven minute mark, the gang is let go from
the police, but since the movie seems to realize it is still pretty
early for the action to get started, the movie then takes a
considerable amount of time showing the gang members hanging around the
neighborhood while getting wasted, occasionally cutting to scenes in
the apartment building with the tenants celebrating the arrest of the
gang. None of this fleshes out any of these characters very much, and
when the gang does finally get off their butts and starts terrorizing
the building, they are all still pretty interchangeable with each
other. It's not helped that they are given very little dialogue, the
little that's there can be summed up with this sample line: "Get the
f**k out of my f**king way, you f**king bitch! Get the f**k off!"
Anyway, when the gang starts its violent rampage, the impact of their
various acts is often lessened by the movie's painfully low budget.
When they kill the dog of the building's blind tenant, they do it
offscreen, and when the blind man finds his dog's corpse, we see it
just as well as he does - not at all. When another tenant later spots
the dead dog and screams, we still don't see it. To add insult
to injury, when the dead dog returns later to the movie, it's shown
completely covered with a bloody sheet. The low budget hurts the movie
elsewhere as well. For example, during the rooftop climax of the movie,
the issue of the leader of the gang is resolved with such a bad optical
effect that my hand went to the remote, not to verify what I
saw like that other reviewer, but to try and figure out just what
exactly happened.
It didn't help that I didn't care that much for what was
happening to the main bad guy; not much had been done to make him stand
out from his fellow gang members with the script or direction, or even
the actor (Enrique Sandino). However, when it came to the characters of
the tenants, I did start to find some positive things. The tenants are
a colorful bunch, not just with the blind tenant, but with a junkie, a
prostitute, and a senior citizen among them. The actors playing them
are generally good, with one standout played by Joe Lynn. Playing a
reluctant-to-get-involved person, Lynn is very convincing as someone
who finds himself leading the fight back despite himself. He doesn't
play the part as all-knowing and wise, but as someone who depends on
tricks he has learned through the years. His plans lead to some
expected violence, but the real violence in Tenement
comes from what the gang dishes out on the tenants several times. This
violence is not presented in a way that most viewers will get a kick
out of; there is a harshness to it. For example, in the rape scene, the
director doesn't show nudity, but shows the victim's agony along with
creepy leering shots of the gang. There are also several stabbings and
slashings that I think are more real than those in other movies. While
knife wounds in other movies show a little blood, in this movie there
is blood everywhere in just a few seconds after the wound is
made. While this particular X-rated violence may be nothing compared to
a movie like Dead Alive, it does stick with you all the
same, and it helps to make the movie, despite the poverty-row filming,
never boring - though it does come close to this in the first 30
minutes. If the filmmakers spent more money (as well as time,
developing the script), we might have had a great sleaze classic
instead of the merely good movie we have now.
Check
for availability on Amazon (DVD)
See also: Chopping Mall, Crawlspace, Prison
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