The sort of Z-grade oddity Troma used to churn out for a faithful audience, the all-too-aptly-titled “Condemned” won’t find the cult following it desperately craves in today’s crowded marketplace. This proudly repulsive pic often feels like a student filmmaker’s audition reel for a “Saw” sequel, though the ample blood and guts on display stems from a viral outbreak rather than torture. Lacking any discernible selling points, the Nov. 13 day-and-date theatrical and digital release will go largely unnoticed.
The paper-thin plot involves a spoiled young New Yorker (Dylan Penn, daughter of Sean and Robin Wright) running away from home to shack up with her lowlife b.f. (Ronen Rubinstein) in a condemned apartment building on the Lower East Side. The various residents include drug addicts, fetishists and shut-ins, and soon enough everyone is infected with a virus that leads to bodies covered by boils and mind-altering hallucinations. Cue the carnage.
Writer-director Eli Morgan Gesner (a clothing designer and skateboarder who previously helmed the skateboarding and hip-hop doc “Concrete Jungle”) could have milked the premise for gleeful counterculture exploitation (like a 21st-century “Basket Case”) or campy John Waters-style gross-out comedy, but settles for mean-spirited banality. There’s a vague sense that “Condemned” aims to be a lament for a grimier, bygone era of urban living — which surfaces explicitly in an acid-dripped monologue that co-star Lydia Hearst (daughter of Patty) levels at Penn’s bland heroine as a knife sticks out of her eye — but it’s hard to be charitable about Gesner’s intentions while his contemptible characters are successively obliterated for cheap laughs.
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From the hyperactive camerawork to muddled sound design, tech credits are (perhaps appropriately) low-rent, though Brian Spears’ revolting special makeup effects would fit in nicely in a superior production.
In a coincidence that surely means nothing to anyone, the pic arrives a mere week after the opening of cheapie action sequel “The Condemned 2.”
