Basket Case (1982)

There’s a Letterboxd review of this film that just says “There’s something maniacally impressive about a movie where the only good performance comes from a screaming flesh basketball”, and that is about as perfect a summation of Basket Case as anything I could come up with. This has been a reasonably sizeable hole in my cult cinema knowledge until now, and it is finally filled (parenthetically, I thought it was kind of hilarious that this restoration that I watched came from none other than the Museum of Modern Art; I always knew they had a film department, but that this would be in it?)…I don’t really know what I was expecting from it, but I think I got what I should’ve expected, if that makes sense.

With a budget of apparently only $35,000—or still only about $120,000 in modern money—Basket Case is inescapably a thing of cheapness; before ever watching the film I recall seeing one of the stop-motion sequences and thinking yeeeee, that’s tatty-looking… and it still was tonight (obviously, it’s not like the film’s changed since 1982) but in fairness the rest of the film holds up well enough. As that review I cited suggests, the acting in Basket Case is, frankly, the cheapest thing about it; It’s pretty basically made and basically played, hardly any of the performers have anything like extensive (or indeed any) credits outside this. But it makes the most of the grotty location in which a lot of the film happens, that being the flophouse hotel where our “heroes”, former conjoined twins Duane and Belial, base themselves on their mission of revenge against the surgeons who separated them against their will; Belial is pretty monstrous but at the same time weirdly sympathetic in spite of everything, and it’s hard to really blame him for being pissed… So not exactly a masterpiece of world cinema, but you don’t always want that sort of thing on a Saturday night anyway, a bit of cheap and cheerful monster movie business. Parenthetically, this is the second film in this “festival” to feature someone getting chopped vertically in half…