by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $15.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Brian Patrick Butler, Kimberly Weinberger, Aimee La Joie, Randy Davison, Merrick McCartha
Intro:
... tar-black comedy and terrific practical effects underpin a blunt but impactful satire on modern America, pulling various pages from the cannibal’s playbook (Delicatessen, Titus Andronicus, even Pink Flamingos) to create a uniquely cracked gem of a film.
This film has bath salt zombies!
For those who somehow need more reasons to watch this (or are still recovering from having watched Bath Salt Zombies back in the day), that slight detail is far from the weirdest thing about this production. Much like The Walking Dead, the existence of cannibalistic drug addicts is more a feature of the setting than an immediate threat, in-place narratively to trap the film’s cast in a Californian apartment block.
Director Tony Olmos and writer Brian Patrick Butler treat the apartment as a microcosm for how royally screwed the entire country has become. Ruled over by an iron fist that shakes hands with all means of power in the surrounding area, unable to leave for fear of one’s own safety against the conditions nurtured by that power, and without a clear shot at the ones responsible for this mess of an existence, people resort to taking out their anger and frustration on each other. Anything to regain a semblance of control over the chaos.
The characters are various flavours of unsavoury and psychotic, from Nick Young’s impressively douchey Tank, to Randy Davison as the resident useful idiot of a sheriff, to the landlady Liz, who looks like Mamaw from Hillbilly Elegy got stuck in a microwave with nothing but a paperback of The Downing Street Years for company (played by Brian Patrick Butler, who is way too effective at portraying the final boss of all psychobiddies here). The attempts at wring comedy out of each of these sun-beaten bodies can be hit-and-miss, but in service to the larger point of the production, they each serve their purpose as the colourful and aggressively nihilistic results of this absurdist lab experiment of a neighbourhood.
While the script’s frequent references to Grimms’ Fairy Tales and the classics of the zombie apocalypse genre can feel a bit on the nose (well, the noses that don’t get lopped off, along with many other limbs), they reveal the genuinely moralistic perspective of the story. This isn’t a tale where the innocents get to count their blessings after miraculously escaping the cauldron of a witch; this is the molar found in half-eaten roast meat, the splattering of cows’ eyes, the family murdered by a game of pretend. This is learning the lesson the hard way, and as Liz’s control over her tenants tightens around the forthright Rosie (Kimberly Weinberger), the cycle of violence and vengeance that landed everyone here to begin with is met with a howling plea for the inner compassionate bitch to emerge and break that cycle.
Utilising Tromaesque outhouse mannerisms (fittingly, given that same studio distributed Butler’s previous film Friend of the World) for thoughtful and literary ends, this is a modern-day cautionary tale with a sickly grin.
Hemet, or The Landlady Don’t Drink Tea is bonkers with a purpose. Its tar-black comedy and terrific practical effects underpin a blunt but impactful satire on modern America, pulling various pages from the cannibal’s playbook (Delicatessen, Titus Andronicus, even Pink Flamingos) to create a uniquely cracked gem of a film. It’s a throwback to the wizened days when folk tales were still too grotesque to be sanded down into animated family films, but the message it brings is all too relevant today.
