Apartment life sounds like misery to me. After all, hell is other people. With “seven floors of terror,” Tenants takes this idea to heart.
Its terrific credits sequence introduces us not only to the apartment building serving as the horror anthology’s setting, but a young woman (the appealing Mary O’Neil, 2023’s Malum) who emerges from a sac of goo in its parking garage. With no memory, she roams the halls, stairwells and other common areas in search of her sister; in doing so, encountering renters along the way, she threads the heptet of stories together.
Most of them work, some even quite well. In the realm of body horror, a former child star (Christa Collins, Aileen Wuornos: American Boogeywoman) attempts to get a gnarly rash under control while prepping for the audition of her life. On the darkly comedic side, the warring roommates played by Fayna Sanchez (OJ: The Musical) and Clarke Wolfe (Deathcember) yield as much of a ball as they do blood.
My favorite, from Jonathan Louis Lewis (Black Devil Doll), crawls into creature-feature territory. It depicts a post-miscarriage woman (Tara Erickson, American Satan) finding quite the scary surprise while doing laundry.
In the middle of all these strange occurrences, Blake Reigle offers a welcome respite by unofficially adapting Eddie Murphy’s classic “Too bad we can’t stay!” bit from Delirious. Finally, O’Neil’s amnesiac wraparound earns a wrap-up in her efforts to evade a smoke monster and reach the top floor — more difficult to do when the building’s architect may have been M.C. Escher.
Despite coming from four directors (including Sean Mesler and Psycho Storm Chaser’s Buz Wallick, both of whom wrote the screenplay with O’Neil, aka Mrs. Wallick), Tenants excels in visual and tonal consistency. This holds true even in the pair of segments that don’t properly pay off. It’s a lesson more low-budget horror anthologies — which number (too) many these days — would be wise to follow. —Rod Lott