Thursday 20 September 2012

DVD review: Tenement (1985)


After witnessing the miscreants shooting up heroin and lunching on rats they killed with loaded .357s, apartment dweller Hector gets fed up and turns in the band of basement squatting junkies. The police arrest them, but justice does not prevail. A few hours after their release, the gang returns with only one thing in mind; revenge! Their plan is simple; take over the building, terrorize, maim, torture and kill every tenant, one floor at a time.Tenement is written by Rick Marx and Joel Bender and is directed by Roberta Findlay. The acting is really bad and the supposedly scary/evil gangmembers looks plain silly their chains, black spandex and leather. And they look way too old for their characters. The are a few very corny scenes. The camerawork and editing is for the most part decent. The soundtrack is bad and the title song is horribly dated and just awful. It´s violent, although not as violent or gory as you might expect. Most of the make-up fx is amateurish and unconvincing, the highlight is when a caracter gets stabbed with a pair of scissors. There is some topless nudity in this.
Tenement is also known as Game of Survival and Slaughter in the South Bronx.
This review is based upun the region 1 DVD release from Media Blasters.
Rating: 1½ out of 7. Kind of a huge disappointment, it doesn´t live up to the hype surrounding it but it has its brief moments along the way. I do like the concept and that it´s pretty grim, vicious gang terrorizes the inhabitans of an apartment house but bad acting, bad sfx, bad soundtrack and so on hampers the impact Tenement could have had. Sure squemish viewers and the politically correct might find this disgusting and repulsive but being a bit jaded I find it to be boring if not a bit tedious.

/JL



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