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# ENTERTAINMENT BRIEFS Board to tears: ‘Poor’ sheds light on shadows
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/entertainment-briefs-board-to-tears-poor-sheds-light-on-shadows/
- Published: 2006-01-06T16:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T17:01:55.000Z
- Author: Dan Dunn
- Tags: Entertainment, Santa Monica, #archive-import

“Kill the Poor” is the tale of a group of culturally diverse misfit squatters trying to stake their claim in a soon-to-be-gentri-fied 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 con-tend 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 film-makers’ 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)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/55/9f/559f9abc-8372-4a2e-8c2d-27386da4e363/content/images/2026/10/010606-13_01.jpg)

(Photo: Special to the Daily Press)

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 6, 2006.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/010606.pdf?ref=smdp.com)