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Tenement (1985) aka "Game of Survival"

Dir: Roberta Findlay

New York. The Bronx.
A gang of leather wearing, coke snorting, gun wielding, flick knife carrying scumbags have taken over the basement of a rundown tenement.
When the Cops are tipped off by the residents the gang are arrested, "Ha ha ha, motherfuckers! Now you gone for good" laughs the Building Superintendent Mr Rojas (Larry Lara) a drunken, generally unpleasant slob.

But of course as is always the case in these films, the Law is suitably useless and before you know it the gang is back to the tenement building for revenge……

Widely regarded as Roberta Findlay's best solo (non-porn) film after the death of her Husband and film making partner Mike ("The Ultimate Degenerate", "Kiss of her Flesh"), "Tenement" is an ultra violent and nasty slice of 80's Trash film making that delivers the exploitative content but wears it's budget and technical limitations on it's sleeve.

Filming in and on actual rundown areas of course adds the kind of atmosphere and grit you just can't get with expensive sets and expensive 'pseudo trash' production design, and Findlay really makes the most of this thanks to her own rough 'n' tough Cinematography.
The film looks exactly like you expect it to look given the plot and that is a big advantage right there!
The less said about the awful title tune (by 'Kool Krew') the better though, it really is a cringe worthy slice of very 80's Electro 'Hip Hop' and really dates the film, and actually shows you how good some of the funky tunes used over 'Concrete Jungle' movies in the 70's were.

Findlay piles on the urban clichés (as it should be) not only in the way they gang acts but also in the 'everything but the kitchen sink' mix of residents. All known stereotypes are here for our enjoyment.
Most of the residents seem to either annoy each other or disgust each other and of course have to put these personal grievances behind them as violence threatens.
The residents include:

Leona (Rhetta Hughes) a young Black woman who wishes for a better life for her and her young daughter and is a full blown pessimist who shrugs off the celebrations at removing the gang saying they'll be back anyway and there is no one in the building with any chance of taking them on.
Mr Wesley (Walter Bryant) and Mrs Wesley (Olivia Ward, who is more bothered about blood getting on her carpet than anything else!) an old Black couple.
An old balls-out Jewish woman.
A blind man, Mr Gonzales (Alfonso Manosalvas), complete with trusty guide dog (oh dear!)
A young couple with the man a junkie and the woman, Carol (Corinne Chateau), hooking herself to support his habit.
Anita , a pregnant South American woman living with her disapproving Mother.
Sam Washington (Joe Lynn) a tough but dour saxophone playing Black guy.
So all colours, creeds, religions and social standing is covered!

And if the characters are rather comic strip, the screenplay (by Joe Bender and Richard Marx) does effectively show the change the violence and death has on the residents, not only in their greater willingness to fight back, but also in their change in attitude to death. A great scene to show this is when they all watch, with cold detachment, as a man is electrocuted to death in front of them, and that includes the children.

As for the gang, well, they sure do look funny to a modern audiences eyes, but luckily they are so damn nasty (and I mean NASTY) that the viciousness overcomes the clothes!
All are pretty much your normal 'scum' characters, and the only actors that really stand out are Enrique Sandino as the gang leader Chaco (with an accent so strong only half of what he says is understandable) and Paul Calderon (who debuts here and would go on to do great work in Abel Ferrara's two masterpieces "King of New York" and "The Bad Lt.") as the sadistic Hector.

Always the adventurer, Findlay tries out various little tricks to keep things interesting.
A perfect example is a weirdly effective scene (shot on a rubble strewn patch of real gangland waste-ground, where body parts were known to pop up!) of 'Angel Dust' tripping Chaco making a speech to his gang where he vows to get the building back and cut all the residents up, Roberta uses a slowly spinning camera and multiple, mixed voices playing behind Chaco's speech to add a far more sinister air to what would otherwise be a just another, oft seen, bad guy scene.

The gore scenes are nice and bloody and although obviously very cheap (a false head used for a spot of eyeball violence is particularly fake looking) the rapid editing and copious amounts of crimson splashed around means these scenes still retain a trashy visceral power, a nasty throat slitting with a straight razor is a perfect example of this.
Though it seems Roberta Findlay can't see how cheap some of the effects are as, during the audio commentary on the excellent 'Shriek Show' DVD, she seems to think she has to point out that a very obvious floppy, falling dummy… is just that. Believe us Roberta, we know!

The much touted 'broom scene' is (very much like the much touted foetus eating scene in "Anthropophagus") nasty more because of what is happening than anything is actually shown, although the aftermath is suitably unpleasant. The frenzied, fist pummelling, gang beating that precedes the scene delivers a more violent jolt in fact.

Some of the action scenes are botched though.
A sequence when the gung-ho old woman creeps down the stairs with a baseball bat to deliver some OAP justice (!) and is scooped up by Washington and carried back up, just as a gang member pulls a gun, should have been a tense rescue scene but ends up a huge non-event with Washington seemingly in no hurry to walk back up the stairs with his helpless pensioner, or the gang member in any hurry to fire the gun (and when he does it's just a single off-screen bang).

Like in the "Flesh" trilogy she made with Mike, "Tenement" shows that neither Findlay has the frantic, punchy kinetic skills (or budget) to make a genuinely exciting action sequence, as an unintentionally laughable scene involving a falling fridge also shows!
The film works much better during the simpler, more 'Horror'/'Splatter' movie based, sequences of violence (like a wonderfully messy crowbar evisceration) than in the chase/gunfight set-ups witch by their nature have to be technically complex and proficient.
And of course seeing as this is a Roberta Findlay flick, we would be let down if there was no full on sleaze, and the welcome highlight here (away from the more obvious rape/sexual assaults) is a blood smeared breasts sex scene between Chaco and his leather clad woman. So politically incorrect it's almost beautiful damn it!

In fact Findlay packs as much dirty and violent incidents and 'gang thriller' clichés as she can into the film and it delivers all that it should, and if there is sometimes a lack of frantic energy to proceedings, it at least manages to avoid being dull.
Energetic in the pacing of individual scenes it isn't, but energetic in its desire to entertain, and to pack in as much nasty and exploitative material into those scenes, it most certainly is.
And by the hour mark it's delivered more juicy Exploitation mayhem that the entire running time of "Death Wish 3", the mainstream film it most resembles (on a smaller scale) and that was also made in 1985. In fact given "Death wish 3" was not released until November of that year "Tenement" might well have beaten it out of the gate!
But a film it most definitely did not beat to release was 1983's "Siege" (aka "Self Defence") a taut little Canadian thriller about a group of tenement residents fighting back against a (far more calculated) gang who have chased a Homosexual they were after into the building (shades here of John Carpenter's classic "Assault on Precinct 13" as well).
Whether or not Roberta Findlay had seen this film or not I can't say, but there are many basic similarities.

Much censored and only available on 2nd rate transfers for many years, "Tenement" has been given a new lease of life (and hopefully a bigger audience) thanks to it's recent, re-mastered, uncut DVD release by the 'Shriek Show' arm of 'Media Blasters'. And as they managed to pursued the normally media shy Roberta into an interview, as well as the aforementioned commentary, any fans of Trash/Exploitation Indy cinema would be mad to pass this up.
Sure the film has many technical faults and obvious budget restrictions, but as a nasty, always entertaining example of the kind of joyfully exploitative cinema that no longer gets made (even by '85 this kind of extreme, Indy movie making was on it's last legs) it's hard to fault.