Basket Case

I originally wrote this for The Fandom Post. You can check out that post here.

In general, Frank Henelotter’s movies have a great deal of empathy and affection for those society frown upon and consider sinners or low lives. Brain Damage deals with drug addition with a great deal more grace and nuance than any other movie made during the Just Say No Reagan-era 1980s, and the title says it all with Frankenhooker. Basket Case, Henelotter’s first feature film, is no different.

Duane Bradley is new to New York, having just arrived from a sheltered life upstate, and he settles into a “respectable” hotel near Times Square. Mind you, this is early 1980s Time Square, complete with porno theaters, prostitutes, and all the other “grimy” elements future mayors would work to remove from the area. Despite that reputation, few of the people Duane meets are ever presented in a negative fashion. The prostitute who lives two doors down, Casey, is a friendly, understanding woman who shares a few drinks with Duane and listens to his hard luck story without any attempt to game the situation, and even the loud-mouthed, grumpy manager of the hotel is mostly talk, rushing to people’s aid when anything sounds out of the ordinary.
In fact, Duane may be the only person deserving of any real shaming, and even that’s something well out of his control. Duane isn’t alone on his trip to New York, as he’s here with his basket-bound former Siamese twin Belial on a quest for revenge.

Duane and Belial were born conjoined, and Belial was born extremely deformed, looking like a tumorous mound of flesh with a face and two twisted, clawed arms. Their mom died giving birth, and their father rejected them. Their father eventually conspires with a trio of doctors to illegally and forcibly separate the twins so that Duane can live a “normal” life, and while both twins survive the operation, this does not sit well with either of them.

Duane acts as Belial’s guide, seeking out the doctors who operated upon them and delivering Belial to each location so that he may enact his wrath. These scenes are pretty great, often using a first person perspective so that we watch Belial as he sneaks about after his prey. The effects and gore are pretty great, especially considering the film’s $35,000 budget. We even get a couple of cool stop motion animation scenes where Belial hops out of his basket and causes havoc that feels more like something out of a Pee Wee’s Playhouse segment than anything, and it’s pretty great. The inexplicable hand saw contraption that dispatches their father is a stand out, as is the final shot of Dr. Kutter’s death, as she screams in agony with half a dozen scalpels and scissors protruding from his bleeding face. If the movie didn’t have a great image in the form of Belial, Dr. Kutter’s face would be the stuff of classic movie posters.

Between the “monster out of place” plot dealing with Belial and the sympathy generated by Henelotter’s style, the whole thing comes off as an exploitation take on the classic Universal monster movie formula. Belial is only monstrous because his father saw him as a monster and tried to have him killed. Had he been allowed to be raised by his far more caring aunt, he’d just be “different,” not unlike the denizens of New York’s “seedy” streets. It’s society’s attitudes towards birth defects and the like that led to the birth of the monster, not the actual defects. A lot of it is played for laughs, especially with the way some of the characters deliver their dialogue, but it’s a shared laughter you get from people who love the thing they’re making and love the monsters they’re creating.

The extras are bountiful, and the highlight for me was a short sequel that takes place after the two sequels from the early 1990s. It’s a documentary/found footage deal where some people track down Duane and Belial decades after their initial escapades. The outcome is predictable, but there are some weird little touches leading up to that ending that make it a fascinating watch.