By Dan Dunn
Special to the Daily Press

The movie: Kill The Poor
The director: Alan Taylor
The stars: David Krumholtz, Clara Bellar, Paul Calderon

“Kill the Poor” is the tale of a group of culturally diverse misfit squatters trying to stake their claim in a soon-to-be-gentrified tenement in New York’s Lower East Side. You may recognize this storyline and setting from another recently released film (based on a Broadway musical, if memory serves), but the similarities to “Rent” end there. For one thing, nobody ever breaks into song in “Kill the Poor” — probably because they’re preoccupied with not getting killed by junkies and thugs. And while unsavory types abound in director Alan Taylor’s tragicomic film, not a one looks as heroin chic as Rosario Dawson in her designer subfusc, nor can evil be warded off by cheesy power ballads from Bon Jovi wanna-be’s. Taylor didn’t have a “Rent”-like budget either, so he shot “Kill the Poor” on a consumer-grade digital video camera with a cast of predominantly unknown (read: affordable) actors. Overall production value is surprisingly good, however, thanks in large part to the impressive efforts of DP Harlan Bosmajian and editor Malcolm Jamieson. It also helps to have a well-crafted script, and scribe Daniel Handler (who occasionally publishes tomes under the nom de plume Lemony Snicket) turned in a very lively adaptation of Joel Rose’s 1988 novel.

It’s the early 1980s, and timorous newsstand operator Joe Peltz (David Krumholtz) has gathered the courage to take his first nibble on a piece of the American pie. After marrying and impregnating a hard-bitten yet sexy French stripper named Annabelle (Clara Bellar), Joe buys into a squalid co-op on the very same block where his immigrant grandparents first settled. The neighborhood has become a war zone since then, however, and the residents of the building must contend with all manner of hardship, from fire-starting delinquents to water pipe-stealing crack addicts, as the attempt to resurrect their forebear’s Eden. The filmmakers’ mine plenty of humor from the never-ending “board meetings” in which the mismatched tenants bicker and booze. The third act, on the other hand, is rife with tension as a conflict with a resident bully who refuses to cooperate escalates.

(Rated R. Running time: 85 minutes)