The Tenement
(Brain Damage Films)
(2003)
review by Head Cheeze

The creative spirit is something that cannot be extinguished by something as trivial as "budget". Your "talent" are your friends and family, "locations" are your homes and workplaces, and your "film" is videotape. While the vast majority of moviegoers would rather gouge out their own eyes with dull spoons than sit through a S.O.V. (shot on video) film, there's a growing market of fans who are tired of the oftentimes sanitised horror product coming out of the major studio system, and, thanks to the affordability of the DVD medium, many distributors are regularly churning out no-budget productions as quickly as they can be made (which, at least from some of the crap I've seen, is pretty fucking quick). Which brings us to Glenn Baisley's The Tenement.

A four part anthology, The Tenement tells the tale of various tenants who lived in the same building over the course of two decades. The first story focuses on a young man named Ethan whose forced to care for his abusive invalid mother. Ethan is a horror movie fanatic who spends his evenings watching Winston Korman flicks at high volume to drown out the verbal abuse from his mother. When Ethan is assigned to deliver flowers to his idol's workplace, he is given an opportunity to audition for a role as a killer in Korman's next film, but Korman and his co-horts laugh at the idea of the wimpy looking Ethan portraying a killer. Ethan is traumatised, goes home, dons a mask, and heads out to give Korman another audition...OF DEATH!

The second tale features a mute young girl who has become an obsession of a neighbour in the apartment building. He constantly watches her dance from the balcony, and peers in her windows. Her parents take the girl away on a vacation to a secluded cabin, and the neighbour follows them, breaking in when the parents make a trip to the store. As the neighbour begins to torment, torture, and rape the girl, he discovers that his "helpless" victim is more than she seems.

The other two entries include a man who thinks he's been bitten by a werewolf, and a killer who stalks his victims using his cab as a means to find where they live.

To be honest, the only segment I found myself hooked by was the segment involving the mute girl and her lecherous neighbour. It had some solid creepy moments, and featured the best acting of the lot (which isn't saying much). The film suffers from the same quality issues that plague a lot of S.O.V. films- bad sound, colour desaturation, video noise, etc. With the affordability of really good Digital Video cameras, Digital Audio Tape recorders, boom mics, and good ol' fashioned ingenuity, this film could have looked and sounded much better. Of course, this technology can only carry a film so far. The real meat of any film lay in the story, script, and performances, none of which stand out as anything special here. On a positive note, Baisley does show an afinity for the genre, and, given time and some proper gear, he could turn in some fine work in the future.

The Tenement isn't a bad film, by any means. It's just not a particularly good one either. I'd be doing our readers, as well as the filmmakers, a disservice were I to heap praise on the film simply because it's a no-budget indie. The goal of the guerilla filmmaking enterprise is to prove that high quality films can be made outside of the Hollywood system. With The Tenement, Baisley hasn't quite achieved that goal, but he's taken a step in the right direction.