Basket Case [20th Anniversary]

MOVIE DESCRIPTION:

The poor social skills of a young yokel turn out to have a horrifying explanation in this low-budget splatterfest, which marks the debut of Frankenhooker director Frank Henenlotter. The film begins with a bloody prologue and the arrival of young Duane Bradley (Kevin Van Hentenryck) at a broken-down New York hotel full of drunks, hookers, and assorted weirdos. An upstate native with few big-city survival skills, the earnest Duane seems slightly off. He flashes lots of bills at the hotel manager, carries a large wicker basket with him, and seems bewildered at the variety of characters on display. Once he's alone, Duane's own behavior becomes bewildering as he talks incessantly to some unseen presence and drops prodigious quantities of fast food into his basket. After Duane visits a surgeon's office and the doctor gets rendered into a mangled corpse, all becomes clear; Duane is half of a pair of Siamese twins who were separated against their will in a brutal operation a decade earlier. Belial, his lumpen, beachball-sized brother, secretly survived the procedure and now wants to exact revenge on those who separated him from Duane. Things go according to plan except for one thing: Duane falls hard for coy, busty Sharon (Terri Susan Smith), the receptionist of one of the nefarious doctors. That doesn't sit well with the malformed Belial, who's as attracted to Sharon as he is jealous of Duane's romance with her. Although no sequel appeared for several years, Basket Case was eventually followed by Basket Case 2 and Basket Case 3: The Progeny; Hentenryck and Belial also make a cameo in the director's Brain Damage. ~ Brian J. Dillard, Rovi

DVD FEATURES:

• Number of Discs: 1
• Audio: PCM Mono, 5.1
• Features:
  • • New film-to-tape digital transfer
    • Audio commentary by director Frank Henenlotter, producer Edgar Levins, and actress Beverly Bonner
    • Two theatrical trailers
    • TV spot
    • Outtakes and behind-the-scenes footage from the director's personal collection
    • Special Video Short: "In Search of the Hotel Broslin"
    • Gallery of "Basket Case" exploitation art and never-before-seen behind-the-scenes photos
    • Two rare "Basket Case" radio spots
    • Two radio interviews with actress Terri Susan Smith
    • Clips from Beverly Bonner's comedy cable TV show, "Beverly Bonner's Laugh Track"

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

• Director:

  Frank Henenlotter

• Producer:

  Edgar Ievins

• Screenwriter:

  Frank Henenlotter

• Cinematographer:

  Bruce Torbet

• Composer (Music Score):

  Gus Russo, David Maswick

• Editor:

  Frank Henenlotter

• Art Director:

  Frederick Loren

• Executive Producer:

  Tom Kaye, Arnie Bruck

• Sound/Sound Designer:

  Peter Thomas

• Makeup:

  Ken Clark, Ugis Nigals

• First Assistant Director:

  Jerome Horowitz

• Camera Operator:

  Jonathan Sinaiko, Bruce Frankel

• Casting:

  Ilze Balodis

• Production Manager:

  Mort Tashman

• Makeup Special Effects:

  John Caglione, Jr., Kevin Haney

• Production Executive:

  Ray Sundlin

• Hair Styles:

  Ken Clark

• Sound Editor:

  Emily Webster

• Continuity:

  Nancy Archer

• Gaffer:

  J.J. Clarke

• Key Grip:

  Buster Muro

• First Assistant Editor:

  Linda Schubell

REVIEW:

• This quirky, inventive little comedy-shocker was only the first of many efforts from writer/director Frank Henenlotter, and it's certainly his most modestly budgeted outing. The gory auteur gets around this problem throughout much of the film by using suggestion rather than explicit special effects and focusing on the clash between Kevin Van Hentenryck's wholesome if offbeat Duane and the assortment of freaks who surround him in his bowery abode. With this fish-out-of-water framework in place, the director slowly teases out his revelations about evil twin Belial, culminating in an extended flashback that is among the film's most cheerfully creepy segments. The lumpy little guy himself is often shown only in flashes, jumping out of his basket on attackers or attached to his victims' necks. Unfortunately, Henenlotter stretches his budget with a pair of extended sequences that utilize stop-motion animation of a quality several steps below that of your average Christmas claymation extravaganza. Far more effective are those scenes that go for lots of blood and just a little Belial, or those that use puppetry, stationary poses, and offbeat humor. (One sequence involving indoor plumbing proves particularly amusing.) Although Beverly Bonner makes a strong impression as Casey, the hooker with a heart of gold who befriends the bewildered Duane, the rest of the acting is what you'd expect from a low-budget horror film. Playing Duane like a particularly winsome autistic child, Van Hentenryck exhibits a strange kind of charisma, but it's hard to tell whether he's a master thespian or just inexperienced. Lucky for him, Henenlotter has learned a lot from the schlock horror of the '50s and '60s, and fashioned a vehicle that renders all such questions of quality and skill moot. ~ Brian J. Dillard, Rovi