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Title: Hemet, or the Landlady Don’t Drink Tea (2024) Director: Tony Olmos Writer: Brian Patrick Butler Studio: Charybdis Pictures // BayView Entertainment IMDb Plot: A tyrannical landlady lords over her tenants during an epidemic, pitting them against each other in a web of paranoia spun for deadly results. Joe Says: Hemet is laden with funny and progressive satire but its low budget theatrics take a detrimental bite out of this horror-comedy.

Indie filmmaking can take spectacular chances that would never make it­ past the first round of marketing tests with Big Business studios. Political and social satire can freely abound; raunchy sex jokes blatantly avoid censorship. Yet, such indie stylizing can also lack refinement. Charybdis Pictures’ Hemet (or the Landlady Don’t Drink Tea) is laden with funny and progressive satire but its low budget theatrics take a detrimental bite out of this horror-comedy.

Written and starring Brian Patrick Butler, Hemet might be named after its San Jacinto Valley locale but takes place during a bath salts epidemic populated with nasty, but not particularly scary, leg-eating zombies. Liz – screenwriter/producer Butler wearing enough drag to make Devine shoot a salute – reigns as slumlord of an apartment complex filled with a host of oddball tenants that she threatens daily with rent hikes, preferential parking, and eviction. This bizarre group is forced to cohabitate as protection from the zombies as well as subjugation under California’s massive real estate issues (obviously filmed before, and set apart from, the disastrous wildfires of January 2025). Liz rules a paranoid-controlled fiefdom and she wants loyal subjects. If eviction doesn’t work, she has no qualms about murder.

After all, the best way to keep that “No Vacancy” sign blinking is to have plenty of applicants.

Butler’s Liz is equal parts scary and funny topped off with a John Waters panache. In fact, all of Hemet could easily be transported to a Waters-set trailer park in Baltimore and no one would notice with all its crazy tenants, rude dialogue and ridiculous amounts of gore. Yet, Hemet on a whole is tonally off. Whereas Butler and director Tony Olmos keep the social commentary forefront, the movie itself inconsistently slips through horror, comedy, crime, and a bunch of Troma-inspired genres. For a simple, silly story, there is too much sugar and not enough protein.

The movie is ripe with both fun characters and surprisingly-strong character actors. Olmos pairs the relational antics with external and societal dynamics, be they wholly ludicrous or darky satirical. Yet any natural rhythm is played to the extreme. The noticeably low-budget vibe then ultimately works against the story. The dialogue and situations are chaotically fun but the amateurish staging deals away any charm.

Hemet (or the Landlady Don’t Drink Tea) is a clever, low-gauge satire that brews too slowly when it should be fizzing over like shaken soda.  After all, Liz doesn’t dig the Lipton anyway.