The Tenant review

He's sad because the poster is more cool than the movie...

Let me start this review by stating every ounce of my soul wanted to like The Tenant, an indie flick from Reel Dreams. And to be fair, the film was not a total flop. There were some (for the budget) impressive gore effects that actually surprised me when they came up. But a horrible script, horrible pacing, and quite possibly the worst acting I have seen in ages kept this from being a recommendation for anyone other than those who just wanna give the little guy a break.

... and even then...

The film opens with a midnight delivery by Jack Rymer (played by Bill Cobbs... the only reason I know the character's name is thanks to IMDB for the record) to Dr Newman (Randy Molnar). The delivery? A bunch of heads. We get a little glimpse of the rather insipid writing-- why is Jack surprised by the delivery when he is the delivery man? That's a bit like me giving you a cheeseburger and then saying “wait, holy shit, is that a fucking cheeseburger!??”

At any rate, we learn the reason Dr Newman is buying heads is to study them. We immediately have a mixed bag of effects-- while some of the skin peeling our doctor does looks realistic enough, once we see the faces of the decapitated heads, with their stiff plasticine appearance, believability just takes a swan-dive. He pokes their eye-ball juices for... well, it isn't exactly made clear how pocking a decapitated head leads to science. We are just expected to bite down and buy that, yes, poking at dead things with needles can lead to huge medical breakthroughs in genetics.

Which... for the record, the script states later is unheard of about thirty years previous to present day. No, I'm not talking about dead-head science. I'm talking about genetics. Apparently to the writers, genetics was something that nobody had heard of thirty years ago.

Well, it's no dead head, but... I suppose it could
still be used FOR SCIENCE!!!

Who wrote this, a goddamned twelve year old?! Actually... I ... wouldn't at all be surprised.

Flash-forward about 45-minutes into the film-- yes it takes that long to establish what is going on approximately 28 years in the past-- and we have learned that the doctor's experiments were injected into his wife's growing fetus by a jealous lab assistant (credited as Ms Tinsley, played by a very stiff Sylvia Boykin-- again, I don't think her name is ever spoken out loud. Or maybe I just didn't care.) This is one of the least believable parts of the script. Ms Tinsley's character is atrocious and unnecessary, and when I say that the actress is stiff, I'm not so sure it is really her fault. The logic of the character is just wretched. First, she is jealous of the doctor's wife (that part is the extent of what I can believe) but this shortly follows by her approaching said wife (“Olivia”, another torturous character played by Georgia Chris...) to tell her, “stop stopping your husband from scientific experiments on dead heads! He's a genius!” While not an exact quotation, this is actually the logic of the confrontation. When Olivia (understandably at this point) refuses to let this crazy Ms Tinsley anywhere near her pregnant ass, the assistant promptly does what any jealous bitch would do-- injects one of her unborn twins with crazy... dead... head... juice.

For science!

Ugh. But sadly, it gets worse boys and girls!

So, after all this, Olivia gives birth ... for some reason at the mental asylum where she works with her husband. And in a glaring error of conflict of interest, her husband has been the only doctor she has seen, and is also the one delivering the babies. In a mental asylum. Because that makes fucking sense. Wouldn't you want your child to be born in the same place people probably shit themselves and throw it? I do apologize for the insensitivity, I am sure there are some truly sad and broken people in a mental asylum, but its hard to deny that it isn't exactly the best environment to be popping newborns.

OK. So, that's the first 45 minutes summarized. Oh, the babies? Yeah, one is born healthy and fine, the other everybody looks at and screams. And of course, Olivia dies from the burden of delivering... seemingly otherwise normal babies in a normal delivery. Seriously. There were no complications, both babies pop out and its like her character was just, “fuck it, this movie is too horrible, I don't want to live anymore,” and promptly dies.

I can't really say I blame her.

The doctor raises both children, and apparently tries to kill the... dead-head injected one. We see this through the eyes of the baby, as it watches from its gated cage/crib, the doctor hanging over with a teddy bear and a gun.

Cut to an exterior shot where we hear the gun go off, never knowing if he shot the monstrous baby, or committed suicide simply to avoid having to suffer through any more wretched illogical scenes.

Yeah. This is the FIRST 45 minutes. And like I said, it gets worse... after the gunshot, we cut to modern day, with a group of people we never seen thus far breaking down in a rainy road. We learn, thankfully through subtle exposition (probably the only subtle thing in the film) that this is a bus filled with deaf children, with a driver who is an ex-con named Jeff (played, surprisingly entertainingly, by J. LaRose, though still suffering through some of the most god-awful dialogue I've ever heard), a teacher of some sort (Liz, played by Aerica D'Amaro, who looks so eerily like the lady who plays Olivia I thought for a moment it was the same actress), a hearing-capable couple (Rob, played by Justin Smith, and... whatever his girlfriend's name was, whose part is too small to bother trying to dig up), and a handful of the aforementioned hearing-impaired children. After their van breaks down and the ex-con is warned not to swear (seriously, I'm not making that part up), they decide to spend the night in the most likely of places, an abandoned asylum.

Hello? Good writing, I know
you must be around
somewhere...

It also should be noted that Liz, to catch up the viewer in case they might have missed the insanity in gathering a group of vulnerable children into an asylum, tells Jeff that she has heard 'stories' of the old asylum.

Fuck it, they go there anyway, because it is either that or a rainy night in a van. So, they break in (after all, it couldn't possibly be property owned and operated by anybody, that would be too inconvenient), and after everyone walks in, the doors slam shut. For... some... reason, because that is the most obvious failsafe to any asylum, that a thick plate of steel slams shut when you break into it.

I'm sure all modern mental health institutions have such security features, active even long after the place has been abandoned. Oh, and speaking of which, it should also be noted that nobody ever really explains why the place is abandoned. It apparently just is. Because... well because it fucking is.

So, as it turns out, this asylum is occupied by the dead-head twin (tada, he wasn't killed by his doctor-father, which ... means, as you learn by the end of the film, that the doctor shot at what apparently turned out to be the cockroaches on the ground...) who kills people. Yup. And apparently this has been going on for awhile, because the group find old blood in the asylum.

The rest of the film is a chase back and forth between the halls of the asylum, which apparently either has many rooms that look alike or ... not many rooms at all. This blooper I can't really push too hard, as it is probably a function of the obvious low-budget, but sometimes it seems almost like the director had Scooby Doo in mind, with the characters running in and out of what few rooms there are, the monster chasing behind them.

And might I add that, with a few exceptions, he bursts into a room, and they all make it out safely (after a bit of struggle). Then, they wait in a room for awhile, decide it's not safe to stay, and then leave for a room to find the monster again.

It's like hot-potatoe or something. And it gets old.

After awhile of this, the film throws a few twists at you that make little to no sense. I won't spoil them here, but pretty much everything that they threw to the story besides “monster smashes room” made me scratch my head.

When the film closes, you are left feeling that what you watched was essentially two movies that didn't fit-- the story of a man of 'science' (head-poking) and his mutilated new science-baby, and the story of a group of vulnerable children trying to make it through the night in a dangerous environment. The second story is obviously the more interesting, and in all honesty, the film could have been the stronger for just saying, “you know this science prologue? Yeah. Fuck it, let's just start with the children, it doesn't make any goddamn sense.”

Even then, it wouldn't have been good per se, but would have at least had room to improve, perhaps by focusing more on the tension of the children trying to find their way through a dangerous maze, not sure of what lurks around the corner.

The 'children' by the way, respond to the monster mostly the same way one would if they stepped in something funny. They look disgusted/scared for a moment, then shrug, and move onto the next room. There is no focus on their fear, no build-up of tension as they make it from one room to the next, they just sort of... bounce back and forth, and what might be fear registers to the audience more as annoyance. You can almost hear them think to themselves, “goddamn it, is this monster ever like... going to fucking leave us alone? I just want to take a goddamn piss.”

The film has its moments; like I said, there are a few special effects that are better than they have any right to be. I did say a few, because there is also a handful that are so atrocious it makes one wonder how they crept into the final cut.

Is it so bad it's good? Not quite that either. There are moments where you chuckle to yourself (mostly during the 'dead melon as a lever for science' prologue), but for the most part, it actually just kinda hurts to watch. Especially considering the issue of children in danger never really feels as taboo as it should. I mean, some of the kids fucking die, but there is no gravity to the moments. Those alive just sort of say “oh shit” and then run.

Let me say that again, just so it registers: some of the kids die, and the film doesn't exploit the gravity of that situation, instead making sure to push through to the next beat. It is the absolute most baffling decision the filmmakers made, with the retarded genetics prologue coming in a close second.

Overall, like I said at the beginning, I wanted to like this film. Something about the obvious low-budget made me want to say, “yes, the little guy triumphs,” but no... no, he doesn't. This is a bit like watching the little guy jump unto the basketball court with gusto, only to be absolutely fucking creamed by his opponents.

And then kicked.

And then he gets up and finishes the game anyway. You have to admire him for finishing, but damn, if you got creamed that badly, just... walk away man.

Walk away.

This film gets a 20%. A portion of that is because, thankfully, some of the female actresses were easy on the eyes. Another portion is that some of the performances were alright (which is high praise in comparison to the rest of the film). Overall, though, the film is an absolute mess of plot-holes, unnecessary exposition, and frustratingly (for lack of a more tactful word) stupid concepts. Seriously... dead eye juice makes killer babies if you inject it into the fetus? And this... is supposed to be science?! At one point, a character is even told she has committed a felony BY A COP, yet in the next scene she wanders home with her groceries.

Just like this film-- breaking laws, such as those of logic and good taste, goes unpunished. And when I say 'good taste' I don't mean that they break taboos in an interesting and vulgar way-- the film would have gotten a better rating if they did so. Sadly, the writer and/or director just do not have the common sense to take some of the film's more interesting concepts-- such as a group of hearing-impaired children in a dangerous setting, how can you not feel bad for the poor kids?!-- instead focusing on things that just do NOT work.

FOR SCIENCE!

20%.

And that's being generous, I am sorry to say. I hope the filmmakers learn their lesson and their next endeavour gets more attention before being thrown into production.