About:
Duane Bradley has just moved to New York City with his brother to meet some old friends. Except his brother is a deformed malicious blob who he carries around in a whicker basket, and their old friends are the cruel doctors who cut them apart when they were kids.
Review:
I had actually never even heard of Basket Case until I saw it referenced in a Trent Shy claymation video at the Crimson Screen Horror Film Festival in Charleston, SC:
How have I never seen this? Basket Case was really good. It was super gory and campy as all hell. When your monster is a foot-tall blob of deformed flesh the campiness sort of comes naturally, but it’s especially charming in this case. From what I could tell the monster, little Bilal, was portrayed by rubber gloves, a mask, and a puppet. These were all done really well. However there were one or two scenes where he was shown through some truly horrible stop motion animation. The only example I could find of this online is a hilarious mashup of ABBA’s Dancing Queen set to Bilal going full Rolling Stones mode on a hotel room:
Having the time of his liiiife…
It is revealed in a flashback scene that the boys’ asshole father blames Bilal for their mother’s death during birth. No respectable physicians will agree to separate the two, so the dad brings in three quacks to perform the operation in their dining room. Amazingly Bilal survives and years later the two set out to exact revenge on the doctors who cut them apart.
Perhaps the freakiest part of this movie was the noise track – Bilal is often shrieking like a banshee getting bludgeoned by an alley cat, and the kill scenes are to the tunes of atonal Moog sounds mixed with various animal noises and loud sirens.
Basket Case was bordering on greatness until the ending, which was so hilarious that it still makes this a must-see. As it turns out, this whole movie really boils down to just a couple of horny bros looking for some action. You can imagine having to bend to every whim of your psychopathic deformed twin might make having a love life a little difficult. So when Duane meets a total babe from the city, Bilal gets jealous that he’s not getting any hanky-panky. Being the man of action that he is, he sets out to show this girl that it’s he who is the more charming of the two. And while I’m reluctant to publish any adult content on this site, I did feel it was necessary to share a certain visual from the film, which I do so now without comment:
The craziness doesn’t end there. The final 10 minutes of the movie are perhaps the best, if only because they are completely outrageous and totally out of character with everything that came before it. As close as they are, the movie ends with yet another pair of victims who failed to adhere to that sacred adage, “bros before hoes.”
Overall: 9
Hell Fire!!!!
Basket Case is a legitimately good movie. It made sense (which always earns major bonus points for movies like these), was very campy, and also quite creepy. The idea for this film was really original and has obviously been the inspiration of several works which have followed it. And you know what? I’m not even going to bother with the physics of a little blob of flesh being able to manhandle full grown men. Little Bilal is all upper-body strength and that’s just that.
CAMP GORE 