Movies

The Tenant

Published

15 years ago

December 22, 2011

I’ll say this for The Tenant, it has ambition. It desires scope, pathos, strong characterization, and respectability so badly that it’s mashed two completely disparate story threads together to try and make it happen. In that sense it’s a bit like Funny People, except not funny and not… good. The film even has the lofty aspiration of making you feel truly bad for its boogeyman, like Frankenstein, but it doesn’t work in the slightest. Unfortunately, The Tenant is watchable only in ways that aren’t intended.

The film’s first half revolves around the love, life and professional tribulations of Dr. Newman (Randy Molnar). He’s obsessed with genetic experimentation to such a degree that he’s buying heads from the morgue and draining their ocular fluid. His wife, Olivia (Georgia Chris), is naturally upset by all of this but his dutiful nurse Ms. Tinsley (Sylvia Boykin) more than makes up for her lack of enthusiasm. Olivia discovers that she’s pregnant with twins and threatens to leave Dr. Newman (who I should add is the head of a Sanotorium that houses patients like Michael Berryman’s crazed Arthur Delman) if he continues with his research. Sensing the marital friction, Ms. Tinsley injects Olivia’s womb with a genetically bastardized sample of Arthur’s spinal fluid. Dr. Newman is furious when he finds out – though not furious enough to fire Ms. Tinsely. Or really even give her much of a reprimand. When the twins are finally born the female is healthy, the male is an abomination, and Olivia dies (of course).

Years later – 41 minutes into the film – a van full of deaf kids overseen by Liz (Aerica D’Amaro) and surly driver Jeff (J. LaRose) breaks down and they take refuge in Dr. Newman’s boarded up Sanitorium. Once the steel door slams shut they’re stuck inside with the building’s “tenant” – Dr. Newman’s deformed son. It’s a bold move to structure a film like this, with what are essentially two halves. They’re so different that The Tenant effectively switches genres (from wannabe Cronenberg to wannabe slasher) at the halfway point.

Unfortunately that bold move doesn’t pay off. As inept as the film’s first half is, at least it’s interesting. Once the story shift happens things go from bad to worse. I suppose that making most of the victims deaf could have been conceived as a device to ratchet up the tension, like having them not be able to hear the lumbering killer. But it’s not used that way. The only real result of this decision is that an indistinguishable group of people are rendered even more indistinguishable by their inability to speak.

The one person who does distinguish himself out of this lot is J. LaRose’s Jeff. Jeff is so unrelentingly smug, stupid, unlikable and annoying that even saving a bunch of deaf kids fails to justify his continued existence. I’m literally astonished that the filmmakers thought they could plug an *sshole of this degree into their film and then attempt to redeem him with slack heroism in the final reel. That’s not an arc, it’s just anachronistic. There’s no way LaRose could even begin to rescue his character with his performance since the script is insistent his every line of dialogue being increasingly petulant.

In the end, The Tenant gets some points over other DTV entries for not being a total bore, but it’s certainly not a success on its own terms. Its flatly lit grasp falls short of its reach in every category.

Movies

Friday, June 26 – These 4 New Horror Movies Released at Home Today

Published

2 hours ago

June 26, 2026

John Squires

Pictured: 'Strung'

This week kicked off with the release of hippo horror movie Hungry at home, and four more horror movies have arrived for at-home viewing as we head into the final weekend of June.

Here are the new horror movies that released on Friday, June 26, 2026!

The Halloween season can no longer be contained to the months of September and October, with “Summerween” becoming a thing in recent years. Essentially, it allows for Halloween to bleed into the warmer Summer months, and the first ever Summerween movie has arrived.

The Asylum released Summerween onto Digital outlets today.

In the film from writer/director Ryan Ebert, “On Summerween, a former circus clown escapes a mental institution to return to his abandoned mansion and hunt the teens partying there.”

Cole Chapleski, Chase Breithoff, Logan Roe, Sophia Sabol, and Clint Morrison star.

Director Ryan Ebert is the man behind a string of recent indie horrors we’ve covered, including Shark Side of the Moon, The Jolly Monkey, Jurassic Reborn, and Predator: Wastelands.

Avalon Fast interview Camp

A witchy coming-of-age story from Dark Sky Films, Camp is now playing in select theaters.

Check your local listings to find a theater near you.

Camp is from writer-director Avalon Fast (Honeycomb, The Serpent’s Skin).

“Emily is the root cause of two devastating tragedies very early in her life, and she feels the weight of these accidents as though cursed. At her father’s suggestion, she takes a position at a summer camp for troubled youth to ease her guilt. When Emily arrives, she is welcomed by the other counselors, who accept her as she is and surround her with peace and forgiveness.

“As Emily begins to believe in a new kind of life, she starts to hear a voice whispering from deep in the woods — one that urges her to go home, and one that may be impossible to ignore.”

The film stars Zola Grimmer in her screen debut alongside Alice Wordsworth, Cherry Moore, Lea Rose Sebastianis (Castration Movie Part 1 & 2, In A Violent Nature), Ella Reece, Austyn Van de Kamp (This Too Shall Pass), Sophie Bawks-Smith (Honeycomb), Izza Jarvis, and Aiden Laudersmith.

Producers Tyler Perry and Jason Blum have joined forces for Peacock Original Strung.

The film is now streaming only on Peacock.

“A talented violinist takes a prestigious job as a music tutor for the gifted daughter of an influential and enigmatic family. As she becomes entangled in their opulent world, unsettling secrets begin to surface, forcing her to question her safety, her dreams, and even her sanity.”

Malcolm D. Lee (Scary Movie 5, Space Jam: A New Legacy) directs from a script written by Alan B. McElroy (Wrong Turn, Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers).

Chloe Bailey (“Swarm“), Lynn Whitfield (Jaws: The Revenge), Lucien Laviscount (“Scream Queens”), Anna Diop (Us), Coco Jones (Vampires vs. the Bronx), Langley Kirkwood (“Banshee”), and Romy Woods star in Peacock’s Strung.

Produced by Diablo Cody, director Meredith Alloway’s Forbidden Fruits brought a new coven of witches to the big screen earlier this year, and it’s now streaming on Shudder.

Lola Tung (“The Summer I Turned Pretty”), Victoria Pedretti (“The Haunting of Hill House”), Alexandra Shipp (Tragedy Girls), Gabrielle Union (Breaking In), and Emma Chamberlain star in Forbidden Fruits, released by IFC and Shudder.

Free Eden employee Apple secretly runs a witchy femme cult in the basement of the mall store after hours. But when new hire Pumpkin challenges the group’s ‘girl boss’ ways, the women are forced to face their own poisons or succumb to a bloody fate.

“Forbidden Fruits grabbed me by the neck the very first time I read it,” Diablo Cody said. “It’s one of the craziest, most creative, beautifully bonkers projects I’ve ever worked on.”

Meagan Navarro writes in her review for Bloody Disgusting, “Forbidden Fruits may not necessarily forge new terrain in the teen satire space, but Alloway brings so much style and energy to her well-cast single-location stage play adaptation for the Gen Z crowd.”

The film is an adaptation of playwright Lily Houghton’s stage play Of the Women Came the Beginning of Sin and Through Her We All Die. Alloway and Houghton co-adapted.