by Keri O’Shea
Regular visitors to Brutal as Hell will have noticed that we’ve got a bad case of retrospective fever at the moment; well, what can we say? 1982 in particular was obviously a hell of a year for renegade horror cinema, and we can’t let these milestone birthdays pass us by without celebrating them. It’s incredible really that, in such a short space of time, we get the releases of both The New York Ripper (which Marc has just written about) and, shortly afterwards, Frank Henenlotter’s Basket Case: these are both films which have enjoyed ardent horror fandom ever since, and whilst they’re different in many ways, what we see in both films is a penchant for ramping it up, mixing the absurd with the grisly, whilst providing us with lurid time capsules of New York way back when, something which fans loved then and love now.
But why the early eighties? What was it about this point in time which generated so many of these kinds of movies that have stood the test of time for genre fans? I think to even begin to answer that question, we have to think about what the VHS revolution eventually meant for filmmakers like Fulci and Henenlotter: with the advent of home video on a significant scale, films could enjoy a life which spanned far beyond the usual short theatrical run, and perhaps even more importantly, meant they could hope to reach a new audience, one which would rent these films and then tell their friends, “You have to see this fucking movie!” just because they delivered so much more of everything: more gore, more nudity, more scares. To thrive in the home video market, it wasn’t just okay to use excess on-screen, it was key to a movie’s longevity, and horror filmmakers were working in a time which offered so much potential for on-screen shocks. Those directors whose visions tended towards the deranged anyway could feel secure – at least in the pre-Video Nasties days – that they needn’t rein in their hideous progeny at all.
And yet, New York born-and-bred director Frank Henenlotter has furnished the horror film world with some of the most hideous progeny ever conceived but it seems he was genuinely caught by surprise by the popularity of Basket Case, his first feature (which was actually made during the tail end of the seventies rather than the eighties). Henenlotter assumed the film would just run on 42nd Street for a while with all of the other grindhouse flicks, and hopefully he’d get back some of the cash he’d spent on it. Instead, Basket Case has refused to die: first it ran for years at the theatres, then lived on through home video, and now, thirty years later, its cult following is still intact. Duane and his brother Belial have become part of the modern horror canon, instantly recognisable to fans around the world, and – although the first Basket Case came before Henenlotter had really crystallised his on-screen sense of humour – the body horror-comedy we love him for was born right here. Don’t get me wrong – Basket Case is definitely not played for laughs and laughs alone, but from the literal use of the phrase in the title to the gasp-out-loud appearance of Duane’s deformed formerly-conjoined twin Belial, we have lots of the Henenlotter stylings we’d see again in later films: human flesh under attack, destroyed by lawnmowers, invaded by an Aylmer, blown up by infected crack cocaine, stitched together again, and, right back at the beginning, scratched to pieces by an irate basket-dweller…
So why do we love Basket Case so much? Of course, a huge part of the film’s ongoing appeal is down to the nasty little bastard in the basket…
Belial Bradley is, to put it mildly, a vile piece of work: the film makes us wait thirty minutes for the big reveal of what or whom Duane is talking to, and when we finally see his dear twin brother, it ain’t pretty. The special effects make-up team, headed up by John Caglione Jr., strikes a very fine balance between the ridiculous and the sublime here! Voilà a distorted, adult-sized head, albeit with basically normal facial features (modelled by Kevin Van Hentenryck, who plays Duane), attached to a short, lumpen torso, and not much else: the only limbs are two claw-like hands, and if you can get past Belial’s appearance, then you have to contend with that raspy breathing and screeching (also down to Van Hentenryck). Shouldn’t judge a book by its cover? Belial is also murderous, jealous, petty, controlling, prone to wild tantrums, oh, and not averse to sexual assault either. Nice. It’s pretty obvious that we are not meant to warm to him at first, but perhaps another reason he has stuck in our minds so much is because, like a lot of memorable on-screen monsters, he’s not just a grotesque creature. He has a back-story as well. As we find out how people have treated him during his life, it all gets more complicated. If a person is treated like nothing more than a parasite, removed from their conjoined twin’s body by force and then put out in the garbage to die, would we expect them to be a well-adjusted human being? It’s not as simple as good twin/bad twin, either. We may start out feeling nothing but sorry for Duane, the physically-normal and naïve guy left holding the basket, but he’s not just a victim in all of this: he’s responsible for aiding and abetting his brother’s violence from the start, and obviously agrees with what Belial wants to do, right up until he starts hurting people who have nothing to do with their sad story. There is a moral ambiguity behind Basket Case after all, regardless of the lurid way it is played out. Everyone has an idea of ‘what’s best’ for the brothers Bradley, and the problem of Duane having a ‘normal life’ causes the problems which follow. Belial acts like a shit, but he’s only doing unto others what has been done unto him. And, hey, the fact that he unleashes vengeance on the doctors (and vet!) who cut him and Duane apart against their will allows for some heavy on-screen gore, which is yet another reason Basket Case retains a special place in the hearts of so many…
It’s funny to think that the original distributor decided to cut all the gore scenes out of Basket Case for its earliest release, hoping that it would endear the film to comedy fans rather than gorehounds. Needless to say, they ended up returning that cut footage: it’s only right, considering that Henenlotter dedicated this movie to the one and only Herschell Gordon Lewis, the man renowned for giving us our very first helpings of technicolour gore. Henenlotter, a diehard fan of the type of over-the-top cinema he went on to make, gives us several grisly scenes which are HGL all over. Look out for the deep scratches Belial makes on his victims, and how the camera fixates on the bright red blood-drenched demise of the characters in question before they slowly shuffle off the mortal coil. There’s even a tongue-severing scene, not dissimilar to what we get in Blood Feast (1963), and a couple of nods to The Gore Gore Girls (1972) for good measure. As influences go, HGL is a good one to have. Basket Case feels very much like it’s continuing in that grindhouse horror vein…
And grindhouse probably owes its very existence to the part of the world where Basket Case was filmed. Just like Fulci did in The New York Ripper, Henenlotter takes us on a tour of the very sleaziest corners of NYC – there are the same fleapit cinemas, the same cheap strip joints – and, again, like The New York Ripper, we are in the interesting position of watching an exploitation movie made and set in Exploitation Cinema Central. One main difference is that this time we have a New York insider using a complete outsider as our point of contact with the city, as Duane (who we think is all on his own at the beginning of the film) tries to get to grips with his first visit to the Big Apple. It’s a big, scary place, and the hotel he finds for himself and his brother at first seems to be filled with crooks who just want to get their hands on that roll of notes Duane so naïvely starts waving around. But it’s not as simple as that: it turns out that the inhabitants of the Hotel Broslin really look out for each other; Casey (Beverly Bonner), the resident tart with a heart, takes Duane under her wing, and then there’s love interest Sharon (one-time actress Terri Susan Smith), who couldn’t be further from the corruption of Drs. Kutter and Needleman – which makes what eventually happens to her all the more appalling, pushing the potential for empathy with Belial as far as humanly possible. People aren’t all bad; Duane knows that, but his brother crosses the line from justified to unjustified violence, and it drives a wedge between them that the surgeons who separated them couldn’t. I don’t think it’s going too far to say that the ending of the film plays out like a grindhouse spin on tragedy, either, especially considering we hear the boys’ aunt reading to them from The Tempest in a flashback scene earlier on in the film (The Tempest boasting its own deranged, deformed character in Caliban). Tongue in cheek maybe, but it’s not a reference which happens just by accident, and it goes to show that there’s more going on beneath surface appearances here. You can take what you want from Basket Case, a little or a lot, hokey creature feature or something a little different, and it has enough there to deliver, all set against the New York streets which Henenlotter knows and loves so well.
For a film made on a minuscule budget, then, Basket Case achieves a hell of a lot. It balances the very nasty with the ludicrous, it tips the hat to the gritty grindhouse fare which inspired it whilst standing on its own as an original piece of film, and – whether it was meant as such or not – it heralds the beginning of the Henenlotter ‘body horror’ genre with its deserved cult following. Whilst Henenlotter hasn’t made a great number of films during his career to date, the ones he does have to his name are instantly recognisable. For them, we must thank the surprise success of Basket Case, with its blend of body shock and 80s culture shock which is still a pleasure to watch, even after thirty years on the circuit. So happy birthday, Bradley brothers! Your place in horror history is well deserved.
With thanks to Marc from http://www.towatchpile.co.uk/ for helping out a gal who only had a copy of this movie on VHS!