Dr. Love’s House of Pain

Endocrinologist Aziz Hubun has discovered a pituitary-secreted hormone (he calls “Azizarone”), which has the potential to reverse the aging process. A sadist who fancies himself a romantic, Aziz is an admirer of the grisly medical research the Nazis and Japanese conducted on unwilling subjects in Word War II. Financed by a venture capitalist, Aziz performs his experiments on undocumented, Mexican migrants caged in a warehouse on the outskirts of Los Angeles. He refers to the captives as “the ones the government wants to build a wall to keep out.” The fundamentals of the experiments are rudimentary: when a person is tortured, the brain produces Azizarone, which can eventually be extracted as a rejuvenation elixir (for the rich). With two accomplices Aziz runs a sideline business harvesting organs. Santiago is a teen living in south LA with his older brother Diego, who is more like a father to him. Diego is an ex-gang member born in El Salvador, now working as a telecom tech and making sure Santiago stays on the right path. Santiago is going through the trials and tribulations of teen life - finished with high school and readying to enter a telecommunications apprenticeship program Diego has pressed on him. Santiago’s crisis of the moment is a girlfriend (Elisa) who informs him she is pregnant - just a few days before Santiago is to move into a new house in Santa Ana with Diego. On a dare Santiago ends up in Aziz’s laboratory of horrors. Later Elisa is also abducted and the teens must witness and endure horrendous torture. Through analyzing Santiago’s hormone levels when Elisa is put in peril, Aziz concludes love is the missing catalyst needed in his research. So he devises a diabolical scenario to exploit Santiago’s love for Elisa in order produce enough Azizarone to further his experiments. After Santiago vanishes, Diego begins investigating. At first he is unsure if Santiago has run off with his girlfriend, or if something sinister has befallen him. Reaching a dead-end Diego turns to an old associate from his past life in El Salvador – the leader of an MS-13 affiliate gang in south LA. Diego must resort to the kind of violence he thought he had forsaken over a decade ago in El Salvador if he is to rescue his brother and Elisa before Aziz’s final ordeal destroys them.