By Simon Thompson
Director Tony Olmos and writer Brian Patrick Butler’s Hemet, is, ironically, ( despite the second half of its title) not my cup of tea. I know, I know, I’ll see myself out. There is a way to combine horror and crude comedy well, for example The Greasy Strangler, John Waters’s Serial Mom, or take your pick of any Troma movie ever made, sadly Hemet can’t hold a candle to any of the paragons of bad taste due to its scripting issues.
The film is set in Hemet, California, during an epidemic (no relation to the big one which happened five years ago), caused by bath salt addicts turning into cannibalistic zombies. As a result shelter has become a precious commodity, a situation which suits a dictatorial landlady named Liz-Topham Mrytle (Brian Patrick Butler in drag) down to the ground, as she can psychological torment her tenants, either downright evicting them with no justification or threatening to evict them for the pettiest reasons possible.
This leads to a split in how the various tenants navigate being forced through circumstance to live under the thumb of a flighty nutcase, on the one hand a faction led by Rosie (Kimberely Weinberger) try their best to stay on Liz’s good side no matter how callous or wrong she might be. The other group, in contrast, led by Gary ( Matthew Rhodes), decide to come up collectively with a plan to topple Liz’s reign of terror. Liz being the paranoid lunatic that she is, begins to become more and more sadistic as she tries to root out Gary – and his fellow like-minded tenants’s rebellion.
The main problem with Hemet is that the jokes aren’t funny. The humour is crude for the sake of being crude, giving the script a quality of the writing of a twelve year old boy who has only just learnt what swearing is. Now before you think I’m some Ofcom botherer type, I love offensive and profane comedy if there is genuine wit, writing talent, and structure behind it. Richard Pryor, Billy Connolly, and Eddie Murphy are three of my favourite stand ups of all time, my favourite comedy of all time is Withnail and I, South Park is one of my favourite sitcoms, and I love nothing more than wasting away an afternoon watching random Derek and Clive compilations on YouTube.
The difference between those and Hemet, is that the swearing is structured around clever wordplay or used to break up a sentence, with Hemet swearing for the sake of it is the sentence. It also doesn’t help that the film’s antagonist Liz, is a pound shop Dame Edna Everage and that Brian Patrick Butler exhibits some of the worst drag I’ve seen this side of Mrs Brown’s Boys. When it comes to the supporting cast, Matthew Rhodes and Kimberely Weinberger do an admirable job given the material that they are working with, but sadly are unable to fully overcome just how chronically unfunny the script is.
The other narrative issue Hemet suffers from is that it tries to juggle too many subplots. Despite being set in a Walking Dead or The Road style environment, we barely get any world building at all to flesh it out, an issue which could have been prevented if it wasn’t a part of the narrative at all, where it would have been treated as second fiddle to the plot surrounding Liz and the tenants.
Despite its scripting issues, Tony Olmos, in contrast, does a first class job as a director. Olmos’s use of bright colours and distinction between day and night, as well as employing unconventional and skewed camera angles during some of the movie’s grizzly death scenes distract from the jokes falling flat.
Overall, Hemet is a tedious unfunny chore, although Olmos and cinematographer Justin Burquist try their collective best, this is a comedy so dreadful that it makes Mrs Brown’s Boys look like Some Like It Hot in comparison.
Bloody Flicks 