"Tenement" is an '80s exploitation flick which is remembered by a few people for its over-the-top gore.
In similar vein to the much maligned, much copied Death Wish movies, "Tenement" is about a group of average people fighting back against a generic gang of hoodlums, which, unrealistically for an American street gang, feature people of multiple races and genders.
This too was taken from movies like "Death Wish", "The Exterminator", "Vigilante". These films all sidestepped the issue of divisions between people relating to criminality and just showed criminals as people from all walks of life who are simply bad and are linked by this badness and must be dealt with, even more violently than they'd deal with you. Your bleeding heart leftist professor is barking up the wrong tree when s/he insists on investigating the cause of crime, which may have something to do with economic background, which is interwoven with race in inner cities... crime is crime! Bad people are going to do bad things! Kill 'em! Kill kill kill!
In today's world, the criminal gang in "Tenement" would get some kind of award from Google for ethnic and gender inclusivity, at least.
When the movie begins, the unnamed gang - who I will take the liberty of dubbing the Woke Wackos - are evicted from their one room flat where they have apparently all been living. Mustn't have been much space. Or were they just using the room to cook drugs? I don't know.
They then begin to attack the denizens of the titular "Tenement", I guess intending to take it over and use it as their new base of operations. The movie has no exposition to speak of. It simply shows activity.
It also doesn't really have any characters. None emerge with anything like a personality. You can tell the bad guys from the good guys because they wear generic hoodlum outfits, ie. leather, studs, chains, piercings. I could gather that one of the Woke Wackos was supposed to be the leader, I guess, though the people in the tenement are nameless and interchangeable, like the rest of the gang.
The movie's violence is unrealistically shown, but nevertheless there is one disturbing scene, featuring the rape and murder of a young black woman, which even includes instant death via vaginal impalement.
The movie then settles into a pattern of some uninteresting activity, some violence. Rinse, repeat. At times it approaches Italian horror in terms of the cheaply depicted sadism on screen. It just never approaches anything like an actually good movie, or one that is really worth watching for anything other than a few shocked laughs.
