Another day, another indie review. Hemet is a horror comedy set in the town of Hemet, California. The alternative title is The Landlady Don’t Drink Tea. This is because the landlady in question only drinks four things: blood, cum, coke and rum. You see tea on that list?
Brian Patrick Butler stars in Hemet as psychopathic landlady Liz Topham-Myrtle. The prosthetics he wears to make him resemble an old lady are terrible, but if you can overlook that, his performance is suitably evil and funny. Liz suffers from verbal diarrhoea and at least one personality disorder.
Liz’s tenants live under constant fear of eviction, which is a big deal in the context of the movie because America is in the midst of an epidemic that turns people into hobo zombies that eat people’s legs. You don’t want to be homeless in that scenario.
Surprisingly, the zombie hobo stuff isn’t a big factor in Hemet and is never treated as a threat to the characters. At one point, the news states that 30 million people are infected, but it isn’t contagious, and you can only be infected by ingesting bath salts.
The President (called Phil Graves!) is treated as a reactionary for wanting to deal with the problem. One guy has a ‘Kill Phil’ T-shirt, which I thought was cool, but the movie does nothing with it. The potential for social commentary is squandered, and it makes me wonder why it’s there at all.
Everybody Hates Everybody
The movie focuses almost entirely on the dynamics between the tenants and the landlady. Every character is unlikeable, everybody hates each other, and the C-word gets used a lot. There’s an above-average number of limbs dismembered. Neighbours are constantly plotting against each other and setting each other up for murder.
There’s way too much dialogue and an overly convoluted plot that unravels more and more as the movie goes on. Life’s too short to even begin to figure it out. Maybe the screenwriter was on bath salts.
Despite this, Hemet isn’t a total loss. Liz is an engaging antagonist. Some of the effects are good for a low-budget horror. There’s enough randomness in some of the dialogue and characters to keep things mildly interesting. Everyone looks like they had fun making it. It just needed a lot more focus to work as either a horror or a comedy.
As always, I give the moviemakers props for willing this movie into existence, but I wouldn’t recommend that you add it to your must-watch list.
Hemet, or the Landlady Don’t Drink Tea is now on VoD.
