A few commercial horror films initially reviled as trash cinema are now considered great works by great filmmakers. Some ’70s pictures by George Romero have been canonized. The earliest shows by Tobe Hooper and Wes Craven are just short of mainstream acceptance, even if they’re difficult to watch.
Frank Henenlotter isn’t quite in that pantheon even if his first movie Basket Case has everything needed for a socko midnight gore-fest. Many of his fans first learned about him from an interview in the RESearch volume Incredibly Strange Films, written when Basket Case was his only released movie. It was illustrated mainly with pictures of his apartment — a nudist film poster on the wall, rubber monsters for doorstops, and (hopefully tricked out for the photo) a real-looking baby’s head on a plate in the fridge. That was ’86. If somebody tried that stunt today, even as a joke, they’d end up on multiple watch lists.
The great thing about this new edition of BC is spending time with the garrulous, friendly, heavily New York accented Henenlotter. The official story is that he was slaving away in advertising graphics when he decided to make his own horror movie. Perhaps inspired by the success of David Lynch’s Eraserhead, he filmed in scattered sessions over the course of a year, as money became available. Basket Case benefits from good cinematography and Henenlotter’s smart, spirited direction. With the help of loyal, talented friends, Henenlotter captured a convincing snapshot of the sleazier parts of Manhattan circa 1981 or so. His outrageous story idea guarantees interest from the gross-out crowd yet he also delivers fun characters and a sympathetic hero.
The show is about brothers but don’t expect The Brothers Karamazov. Carrying a mysterious basket, young Duane Bradley (Lance VanHentenryck) checks into the Hotel Broslin, a Times Square flophouse (into room #7, Val Lewton fans). A likable, everyday kind of guy who would not seem to be looking for trouble, Duane nevertheless spends his days tracking down the doctors who performed an operation on him when he was a young boy. Duane was born with a vestigially deformed growth on his side that was actually his brother, Belial. Nobody realized that the brothers were telepathically linked. Several years ago, two doctors and a veterinarian separated Duane from the pulpy white monstrosity Belial. Duane responded by murdering his own father. He rescued Belial from the trash heap. A benign aunt (Ruth Neuman) sheltered the two of them with loving kindness.
Now Duane is aiding Belial in a campaign of murderous revenge. The mission is complicated by the fact that the telepathic relationship still functions, so Belial knows everything that Duane is doing. Duane is trying to keep himself open to new relationships, as with the receptionist Sharon (Terri Susan Smith) he’s met while casing a potential victim. Belial is dependent on Duane, but also jealous of his love interests . . . murderously jealous.
Basket Case has nothing to apologize for. In all basics it’s a well-made movie with good camerawork and direction. Henenlotter clearly cares about quality. He may not have decent production resources but he knows where to put the camera and he cares enough to do the best work he can. That puts him far ahead of most directors at this level of filming including his credited mentor Herschel Gordon Lewis. His picture is a lot more than bait for the gore fans. Not too much in the picture is egregiously offensive, certainly not the ‘bad taste’ central concept. Expect some obligatory nudity, but there’s not even that much swearing. The gore mostly involves tossing blood and muck about. For a dream scene VanHentenryk was induced to run naked down a dark Manhattan street in the middle of the night, which is no mean stunt in itself. Although disturbingly twisted, the Belial puppet is just a hunk of rubber. Although Belial makes a couple of jolting surprise entrances most of the slaughter scenes invite knowing laughter. We’re in on the joke.
The acting is of course uneven. VanHentenryk is good and some of the other actors even better. The hotel superintendent (Robert Vogel) and Duane’s prostitute neighbor (Beverly Bonner) come off as rounded characters that we care about. Only the girlfriend Sharon tends toward amateurishness in some scenes. How is one supposed to perform when attacked by the creepy Belial?
Instead of a mentally challenged killer brother in a closet, Duane has a deformed toadstool brother that he carries around in a basket. Every ten minutes comes a requisite scene with blood splashing on the walls. Faces are ripped up like a cat’s scratching post, but we aren’t expected to take anything seriously.
The Belial monster is competently handled in most scenes. He’s mostly pitiful, an inert lump of latex pulled by wire or stuck on a broom handle. For some shots he’s manipulated via stop-motion animation, which is amusing simply because the result is so crude. Belial remains interesting because we know he has a personality and a purpose.
Henenlotter’s film was released at a time when a no-budget film might find real theatrical exhibition rather than be relegated to the ghettos of direct-to-video. The show gathered the right kind of reviews when new: it was called sleazy, reprehensible, indefensible and disgusting, even by genre critics that regularly championed transgressive pix on political grounds. Those were great days for cocky independent pictures; BC started as a Midnite Movie and eventually earned a real release. Henenlotter is on record claiming no higher goal than making a good gross-out horror show. He’s the first to call Basket Case total trash, and proudly so — he’s a connoisseur of gutter exploitation.
Henenlotter would soon seek out sleaze filmmakers from the previous generation, David Friedman and Herschel Gordon Lewis. He later teamed up with the late Mike Vraney of the Something Weird Video label, on projects to preserve historical grind house pictures. He’s returned to make a number of sequels, and to try his hand at other outrageous film projects. For fans of marginal films, he’s become a sort of blue-movie Robert Osborne.
Frank Henenlotter didn’t seek a mainstream career from his success. After the success of Basket Case the only offers he received were for slasher films, for which he had no use whatsoever. In the 1986 interview he expresses his disenchantment with contemporary mainstream horror and his disinterest in popular Spielberg movies, so the mainstream probably wasn’t what he wanted anyway.
Basket Case offers plenty of fodder for critics that like to dissect pop genre pix. The Belial story initially comes off as an opportunistic melding of Sisters and Eraserhead. Henenlotter also leans on the Jekyll and Hyde / Psycho transference theme. It could very well be an ordinary split-personality story, if Duane were simply deranged and only imagining that he has a monster in a basket. There’s never any doubt that Belial does exist as a separate creature, but he still represents half of a serial-killer type of psychopathic personality.
The definition of ‘belie’ is to betray, so perhaps Belial is the nasty, destructive and socially taboo part of Duane Bradley. He can be kept hidden from the world but he can’t be denied. Duane loves his brother and is loyal to him to the bitter end. The horror comes from Duane’s inability to (sigh) reconcile all this killing and gore with his desire for a normal life. The sketchy relationship engages us and elevates this agreeably sleazy picture far above 42nd street.
