This week, I had the unique opportunity of watching a rather
brilliant new documentary from some up-and-coming young filmmakers.
Entitled “Hill’s Haunted Hill House on Haunted
Hill,” the film just happened to be about my apartment
building.
Perhaps I should explain.
Last summer, I was suddenly thrust out of my old apartment
building on Veteran Avenue and forced to find some domicile that
(1) didn’t already have people living in it and (2)
especially didn’t have my parents living in it. So, my
friends and I felt rather fortunate to find an apartment on
Roebling that met both of these requirements.
What we didn’t realize was that this apartment
unfortunately happened to be a slum. Well, perhaps slum isn’t
the right word. This place would need some major renovation before
it could be called a slum. Right now, it’s floating somewhere
between crack den and hovel. From the outside, it looks like any
other ordinary Westwood apartment building, except that it could
have been built by Vincent Price. I’m serious, here. The
place looks haunted. The first five months I lived here, I expected
to find a dead hooker every time I opened a closet. But I
digress.
In truth, the building probably does not have any actual corpses
or evil spirits, per se (although my roommate Aaron swears we have
a possessed office chair). But we did have the man from the gas
company come and tell us that there were enough chemicals in our
basement to make a bomb that would “destroy the
building.”
The real purpose of this visionary documentary film, however,
was to record the rampant health and safety violations going on
within the confines of my and my neighbors apartments, but
eventually the project became so much more than that. What director
(and my next door neighbor) Angela Torres has crafted is beyond
mere home video recording, and would be better classified as
artistic achievement.
Angela has no formal directing experience, but instead says that
she was driven to take up a career in filmmaking “to get the
weird homeless guy out of the basement.”
Now, I’ve talked to many directors, but Angela is only the
third to cite this inspiration for a career in movie-making (the
other two being Paul Thomas Anderson and David Lynch, who
originally made “Eraserhead” to scare away transients
squatting in his attic), so you know her film is going to be
special.
Special might not be quite the right word. What Torres and
co-director Tim Fritts (along with a large ensemble cast of
residents, myself included) have crafted is perhaps the most
horrifying thing ever put onto celluloid ““ the inside of a
dilapidated, ancient Westwood apartment building on the verge of
being condemned.
Watching this movie is extremely reminiscent of “The Blair
Witch Project,” another horror film made by a group of
amateurs with a home video camera. All of the new technology coming
our way, from digital cameras to computers with built-in editing
equipment, are allowing more and more people to start making their
own movies, and getting them seen by other people independently of
studios, agents or the entire Hollywood system.
It’s quite an interesting time to be a filmmaker, and
though the purpose of our little documentary was to file a report
with the city about health violations, it just as easily could have
been to entertain the masses.
The film opens in Torres’ own domicile, where a leaking
pipe above the kitchen ceiling has caused the entire surface to
warp considerably. The camera zooms in on a drip of brown water
dribbling onto the linoleum floor.
“Psycho” has nothing on this ceiling. I think that
before this section of the film is screened for an audience,
they’ll have to warn anyone with pacemakers to leave the
theater.
The film continues through several more apartments, each with
more grotesque features then the last. This room has a wall
crusting over from water damage, this place has a front door that
won’t close all the way, let alone lock, and this apartment
has had half of its window eaten away by termites. I feel as if
I’m stuck in that Tom Hanks’ movie “The Money
Pit,” except instead of Shelly Long here to comfort me,
I’ve got my roommate Aaron. It’s just not the same.
The footage turned out extraordinarily creepy, and the film as a
whole is definitely as shocking as “The Sixth Sense,”
although without the twist ending, or big stars, or plot or
anything. Torres’ only hope is that, in addition to being
scary, her debut film will inform people about the horrible
condition of her apartment building, so that maybe her manager will
fix some of the damage, or at least put her up in a nice hotel.
“I’ve been living in squalor!” Torres
exclaimed loudly at me. “I just want our manager to send us
to a hotel because they’re tearing the place down anyway. We
want to live in the W.”
And, I’m sure that’s something all of us can relate
to.
In a world where justice is threatened, when there’s
nothing to believe in, believe in hope. Daily Bruin Pictures
proudly presents Lonnie Harris, coming from keyser@ucla.edu to a newspaper near you.