Basket Case...How Much More Grindhouse Can You Get?

 Not too long ago, Shudder recently added this to the library. It was a good chance to watch this ahead of a fresh revisit to Frankenhooker, coming later.

I seriously believe this is the epitome of New York City at its grungiest, lewdest, unpolitically correct, grotesque, nightmarish and trashiest. Or at the very least, Frank Henenlotter's Basket Case (1982) is right up there with the likes of Combat Shock and Street Trash, maybe even C.H.U.D. for grimy, filthy NYC. Maybe in a double bill with Maniac (1980), you can feel the poverty, sleaze, drugs, and crime permeate from every pore of the NYC Henenlotter's Basket Case gives you.

 You actually have the malformed, hideous twin Belial attempting to sodomize healthy "normal" Duane's naked girlfriend! The scalpels protruding from the veterinarian's face after Belial jams her face in a drawer full of surgical instruments, or eviscerated faces ripped up by the vengeful creature, wanting revenge for being separated from Duane, thanks to a widower father bitter and angry after losing his wife due to the childbirth.

There's plenty of a fleabag hotel with poverty row renters seemingly cash strapped, urbanites with nowhere else to go, often crowding the thin halls when Belial goes berserk as it furiously fears Duane is about to abandon him. Henenlotter spends a lot of time in this flop building needing a fresh coat of paint, renovations, sturdier doors and locks, and, at the very least, HBO.

Henenlotter shooting on 42 Street, in Time's Square, and even at the Statue of Liberty, he gets a hell of a lot out of the locations. Now Belial's puppetry, stop motion movement, and even the director's hand using a glove might be viewed by more sophisticated users as a bit too cheap and dimestore, but I LOVED all of it personally. Henenlotter does a lot with so little. I think he should be commended for it. I think spending time where Henenlotter does also gives us a timewarp back to a New York City; there is this authenticity, a personality, even if most folks might never want to personally walk these streets and sidewalks, live in those unsavory tenements, congregate with its strip club patrons, adult store frequenters, street walkers hoping a car stops with drivers holding a lot of cash to spend, and drug pushing dealers hoping to sell some dope to junkies needing a fix.

But a link between brothers, to me, is what this film really emphasizes to me. No matter how distant Belial and Duane are from each other, they have a connection that is symbiotic. There is this synchronicity between those two. Some psychic link that holds those two brothers together. And that ending -- with how Belial loses control and attacks his brother, going out a window, trying to hold on to a ladder rail, resulting in a serious strangulation and crash and burn -- is always rather potent to me. It was an extreme reaction where brothers seem fed up with each other and yet cannot be apart. 

How Henenlotter uses the basket is innovative because he can save on use of the puppet and stop motion by shooting out of it, looking into Duane's face and having Duane drop food into it (just shaking the basket and having part of the puppet peek out). But that stop motion hissy-fit by Belial in the hotel room knocked my block off...LOVED that shit. And the innocuous face of Kevin Van Hentenryck, seemingly non-threatening and amiable is such a direct opposite of the monstrous Belial. So worthy of its cult status, obviously Basket Case won't be for everyone's taste. I'm not sure this could be made in America today. 3.5/5