'The tenant in room 7 is very small, very twisted and very mad.' (Basket Case (DVD))

Member Name: hogsflesh

Product:	Basket Case (DVD)
Date:	18/06/08 (90 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Funny, grotesque and endearing

Disadvantages: Very cheap - the production values are very low

A review of just the film. The UK-release DVD will set you back a ridiculous £15 on amazon, but a Region 1 edition from Something Weird Video crammed with extras can be imported for about a fiver.

This is a very low-budget, entertaining horror comedy from 1982. The director, Frank Henenlotter, wanted to make the kind of film that would play well in the sleazy grindhouse joints of 42nd Street, and he succeeded pretty well, while still making something funny enough to amuse people unfamiliar with grindhouse. (This is presumably what Tarantino was trying to achieve with Death Proof, but as always he tried just that bit too hard.)

A seemingly naïve young man, Duane, arrives at a scummy hotel in Manhattan. He has a large wicker basket containing something very nasty - something that eats at a ferocious rate and seems to talk to Duane telepathically. I won't spoil things, although I doubt it really matters; expect revenge, romance, jealousy and people constantly trying to find out what's in the basket.

I'm normally not a fan of horror comedies; very few of them really work - Gremlins is probably about the best there is. Most great horror films have some humour in them, but all too often when you try to graft knowing comedy onto a horror film you end up with something unwatchable. Basket Case isn't exactly laugh-out-loud funny, but it's amusing enough, if only for the amazing Noo Yawk caricatures in the cast. It works as a comedy but it also has enough moments of gory excess to make it work as a horror film.

It's incredibly low budget. This is a real advantage when it comes to the locations, most of which are presumably genuine. The hotel has a great low-rent ambience, with paint flaking off the walls and really uninviting rooms. Duane and his basket also get to hang around in a scummy bar and a flea-pit cinema (the kind where the film would later be shown, I expect). Even the doctor's surgery looks horrible. There's a lengthy flashback sequence which features slightly nicer-looking but just-as-cheap locations.

The film gamely ignores the incredibly bad performances from its at-best semi-professional cast. Duane himself, while probably the best actor on offer, is far from brilliant, and he has absolutely hilarious bouffant hair. A film by the hated Troma would really play up the inadequacies of the acting, nudging and winking at the audience in a desperate attempt to get them to play along - films that *try* to be funny-bad should never be allowed into production. Here, although the production values certainly aren't good, the film never derives humour from its own cheapness and coasts through on its considerable charm and pulpy excess.

It's a gory film, but the gore effects are very cheap and the acting not quite up to portraying real pain (one corpse is very noticeably still breathing). Still, it does come close to genuine nastiness a couple of times. The creature in the basket is kept hidden for quite a long time, but when we do see it, it's impressively hideous, like a tumour with teeth and a nasty personality. Occasionally it's animated by really poor stop-motion, but usually it's a hand puppet - imagine Animal from The Muppets after being exposed to a lot of radiation and you'll probably not be far off. Simultaneously ludicrous and queasily unpleasant, it's the most memorable thing in the film by some way. It sounds great, too - it has a really nasty, annoying and funny roaring noise that's perhaps the most memorable thing in the film.

The music is entirely generic, moody synthesiser, which works well enough and obviously saved a few pennies. The picture quality isn't great, and there's quite a lot of handheld camera work that isn't done terribly well. But like I keep saying, it's a dirt cheap film, and if you're willing to buy into that, it's fine. There's some nudity, although for once the only full-frontal is male.

This somehow works far better than a lot of higher budget films - it's better than The Exorcist and The Omen put together. It's spawned a couple of sequels and is loveable in a way that few other 80s American horror films are. It won't be to everyone's taste, of course, but it brilliantly captures a scuzzy ambience, both in terms of place and subject matter, and should at least raise a smile.

Summary: A low-budget cult classic horror