HEMET, or the Landlady Don't Drink Tea (2023)
a review by Evan Landon
To be completely honest with you, I had no idea that “Hemet” was an actual city in southern California, much less a dark indie comedy from 2023 that completely skipped my radar. The root of the word is “a cloth to finish garments” which will not help you in understanding just what the fuck is going on in this movie.
What this movie attempts to conjure is a small town in SoCal that is under attack by zombie-like citizens that are turned in to cannibals via bath salts. Now, this is no ordinary zombie apocalyptic invasion because the zombies are not truly zombies. In fact, they are merely regular ole folk that happen to be addicted to bath salts just meandering around town that get high and cannibalize people.
The plot revolves around a residential complex in the arid area of southern California that resembles a dilapidated motel in the middle of nowhere, although the city streets do not seem to be affected. There is a small town police force that patrols, as the beleaguered tenants resolve to find new ways of dispatching their geriatric landlady that has absolutely no problem cursing them out or evicting them for no reason. The more we find out about these tenants, however, it would seem that she is not the worst of the lot of them.
Built on a shoestring microbudget, a movie like Hemet, or the Landlady Don't Drink Tea must depend on its characters and wily dialogue in order to excel beyond other films with larger budgets just to compete. If it was an indie heartbreaking arthaus tearjerker, it would be built on scenic photography and people you don't know crying every 5 minutes, but this is a black horror comedy, so you kind of have to wait for the gore - which is adequate for what kind of film this one attempts to be.
Let's count some of the kills, shall we: A hippy gets an axe to the head after being offered a six pack of truce, a cop accidentally shoots a psychopathic redneck in the head after cutting off the hippy's hand, a cat gets blended up with bath salts so a boy can poison his family, his young girl is gunned down in the back by cops trying to escape, and most of the characters that are left end up with their legs eaten by bath salt zombies.
Now, if I was going to search for an underlying theme here, I would say that while this film was filmed in 2021 during the pandemic, it represents a profound view of what isolation would seem like to a person cut off from the normality of everyday life and left to their own devices instead. The few people around are equally as distressed and possibly more warped than the next with absolutely no release of their frustration.
As a standout, co-writer and producer Brian Patrick Butler leads the cast as the savage, filthy, elderly landlady that terrorizes her tenants, but the cast is able to coalesce with his charisma enough to pull off a fun little B-movie that truly understands what it is and they all understand the assignment. If you enjoy a schlocky, low-budget movie that is self-aware in its complexity, this is definitely one to check out.
Poor cat though. That always gets me.
3 Out Of 5