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I have to admit that I have always found Siamese twins fascinating. Not in the staring at them for hours on end in a sideshow kind of way though. No, I just find the logistics of living as one of the twins amazing. Just the simple things in life such as getting dressed, going to the crapper and any number of other tasks that most of us take for granted. It just seems like hard bloody work to me. Unfortunate yes, but hard work nonetheless.
Why am I yammering on about Siamese twins you may well ask? Or not as the case may be. Well, the reason is that Basket Case is about Siamese twins. And a ripping good yarn it is too.
The movie starts off with a fella getting savaging murdered by an unknown assailant. Well there’s a shocker for a start in a horror flick! All will become clear though shortly.
The focus then switches to Duane, a young man who is visiting New York City, along with his rather funky looking wicker basket. Because if you don’t want to draw attention to yourself what better thing to carry around with you than a bloody great basket.
Well, Duane checks into a hotel and then proceeds to start looking up the numbers and addresses of a couple of doctors, in-between conversations with the basket.
The reason he is looking up these doctors is that he wants to find those responsible for separating him from his twin brother Belial, yes that’s who residing in the basket in case you hadn’t guessed.
Along the way he manages to chat up a pretty young receptionist, flirt with the hotel’s resident hooker and feed his brother a steady diet of fast food. Oh and there is also the odd murder or two thrown in for good measure.
This is pure B-movie mayhem. From the sleazy back streets of New York right down to the acting, which itself ranges from not bad to “please get off the screen you’re ruining the movie” kind of bad. I can forgive the acting though as it just adds to the whole flavor of the movie. It’s cheap, it’s nasty but it’s bloody good fun as well.
Not that it has aged all that well though. Well the special effects haven’t anyway. Most of the bloodier scenes still look terrific, with lots of laceration and severed body parts. It’s actually the movies main focus, Belial, where the flaws begin to show.
Switching between puppet-work, which doesn’t look too good, to stop motion footage, which looks really bad. The result of this is that you can’t really take the character seriously. Admittedly there are times when his on screen presence is suitably menacing, usually when he is screaming or murdering someone. However, the damage has been done, and try as I might I just couldn’t get the image of someone with their hands shoved up his ass in an attempt to bring him to life. Not a pleasant thought I must admit.
One thing that did make me chuckle a little though was the fact that there only seemed to be one person working at the hotel, and that was the manager. It didn’t matter what time of day it was, you can be assured that he is on duty. Hope he gets paid overtime!
Dodgy puppet work and overworked hotel staff aside, pretty much everything works well in this low budget movie. The story is engaging enough, the main character of Duane is played well by Kevin Van Hentenryck, adding as he does a little emotion to proceedings.
One real shame is that director Frank Henenlotter didn’t make too many more movies. Apart from the two sequels, he only gave us the wonderful Brain Damage and Frankenhooker. In fact his last movie was released way back in 1992. A very promising directorial career gone AWOL if you ask me.
With this release Image Entertainment have pretty much dug out everything they could find connected to this movie. There are interviews, radio and TV spots, trailers, behind the scenes footage, out takes, art galleries as well as a video short and an audio commentary by the director, producer and two of the actresses to round things up. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a kitchen sink hidden in there somewhere!
A truly worthy release then of a sometimes forgotten gem from the 80′s. Sure the movie hasn’t aged as well as I have, but it is still a wonderful little movie that I’d recommend to anyone that loves B movies with a little bit of fun mixed into their horror.
Just don’t watch this expecting a glossy, CGI laden extravaganza because you won’t get that. You will get a sleazy little gem though, and that sounds just dandy to me!
