Themes: Mutants, Twins and Lookalikes, Serial Killers
Main Cast: Sean McCabe, Kevin Van Hentenryck, Ilze Balodis, Terri Susan Smith, Beverly Bonner, Tom Robinson, Chris Babson, Robert Vogel, Diana Browne, Maria T. Newland
Release Year: 1982
Country: US
Run Time: 90 minutes
MPAA Rating: NR
Plot
The poor social skills of a young yokel turn out to have a horrifying explanation in this low-budget splatterfest, which marks the debut of Frankenhooker director Frank Henenlotter. The film begins with a bloody prologue and the arrival of young Duane Bradley (Kevin Van Hentenryck) at a broken-down New York hotel full of drunks, hookers, and assorted weirdos. An upstate native with few big-city survival skills, the earnest Duane seems slightly off. He flashes lots of bills at the hotel manager, carries a large wicker basket with him, and seems bewildered at the variety of characters on display. Once he's alone, Duane's own behavior becomes bewildering as he talks incessantly to some unseen presence and drops prodigious quantities of fast food into his basket. After Duane visits a surgeon's office and the doctor gets rendered into a mangled corpse, all becomes clear; Duane is half of a pair of Siamese twins who were separated against their will in a brutal operation a decade earlier. Belial, his lumpen, beachball-sized brother, secretly survived the procedure and now wants to exact revenge on those who separated him from Duane. Things go according to plan except for one thing: Duane falls hard for coy, busty Sharon (Terri Susan Smith), the receptionist of one of the nefarious doctors. That doesn't sit well with the malformed Belial, who's as attracted to Sharon as he is jealous of Duane's romance with her. Although no sequel appeared for several years, Basket Case was eventually followed by Basket Case 2 and Basket Case 3: The Progeny; Hentenryck and Belial also make a cameo in the director's Brain Damage. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide
Review
This quirky, inventive little comedy-shocker was only the first of many efforts from writer/director Frank Henenlotter, and it's certainly his most modestly budgeted outing. The gory auteur gets around this problem throughout much of the film by using suggestion rather than explicit special effects and focusing on the clash between Kevin Van Hentenryck's wholesome if offbeat Duane and the assortment of freaks who surround him in his bowery abode. With this fish-out-of-water framework in place, the director slowly teases out his revelations about evil twin Belial, culminating in an extended flashback that is among the film's most cheerfully creepy segments. The lumpy little guy himself is often shown only in flashes, jumping out of his basket on attackers or attached to his victims' necks. Unfortunately, Henenlotter stretches his budget with a pair of extended sequences that utilize stop-motion animation of a quality several steps below that of your average Christmas claymation extravaganza. Far more effective are those scenes that go for lots of blood and just a little Belial, or those that use puppetry, stationary poses, and offbeat humor. (One sequence involving indoor plumbing proves particularly amusing.) Although Beverly Bonner makes a strong impression as Casey, the hooker with a heart of gold who befriends the bewildered Duane, the rest of the acting is what you'd expect from a low-budget horror film. Playing Duane like a particularly winsome autistic child, Van Hentenryck exhibits a strange kind of charisma, but it's hard to tell whether he's a master thespian or just inexperienced. Lucky for him, Henenlotter has learned a lot from the schlock horror of the '50s and '60s, and fashioned a vehicle that renders all such questions of quality and skill moot. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide
Lloyd Pace - Dr. Harold Needleman; Florence Shultz - Nurse; Bill Freeman - Dr. Julius Lifflander; Mary Ellen Shultz - Nurse; Constantine Scopas - Hotel Tenant; Charles Stanley - Hotel Tenant; Sydney Best - Hotel Tenant; Johnny Ray Williams - Hotel Tenant; Yousef Abuhamdeh - Hotel Tenant; Lubi Kirsch - Hotel Tenant; Catherine Russell - Hotel Tenant; Mitchell Huval - Hotel Tenant; Pat Ivers - Street Girl; Emily Armstrong - Street Girl; Noel Hall - Drake; Bruce Frankel - Second Detective; Russell Fritz - Casey's John; Joe Clarke - Brian "Mickey" O'Donovan; Ruth Neuman - Aunt; Kerry Ruff - Detective; Dorothy Strongin - Josephine; Richard Pierce - Mr. Bradley
Credit
Frederick Loren - Art Director, Ilze Balodis - Casting, Nancy Archer - Continuity, Jerome Horowitz - First Assistant Director, Frank Henenlotter - Director, Frank Henenlotter - Editor, Tom Kaye - Executive Producer, Arnie Bruck - Executive Producer, Ken Clark - Hair Styles, Gus Russo - Composer (Music Score), David Maswick - Composer (Music Score), Ken Clark - Makeup, Ugis Nigals - Makeup, John Caglione, Jr. - Makeup Special Effects, Kevin Haney - Makeup Special Effects, Jonathan Sinaiko - Camera Operator, Bruce Frankel - Camera Operator, Bruce Torbet - Cinematographer, Mort Tashman - Production Manager, Edgar Ievins - Producer, Peter Thomas - Sound/Sound Designer, Emily Webster - Sound Editor, Frank Henenlotter - Screenwriter, J.J. Clarke - Gaffer, Buster Muro - Key Grip, Linda Schubell - First Assistant Editor, Ray Sundlin - Production Executive
Naïve Duane Bradley (Hennenlotter regular Kevin Van Hentenryck) arrives in New York City carrying a basket containing his monstrous parasitic twin, Belial, who is so inhumanely malformed that the few people who know of his existence doubt he can even be considered a human. After their mother died giving birth to them, the conjoined twins' father loathed the sight of them and referred to them simply as "the child and the monster". Embittered by the death of his beloved wife, he turns to three doctors who are his last hope of separating the twins so that Duane can have a normal life and Belial will hopefully die. Surviving the operation, the twosome track down and murder the three doctors responsible for separating them.
The special effects for Belial consist largely of a puppet in some scenes and stop motion in others. When Belial's hand is seen attacking his victims, it is really a glove worn by Henenlotter. The fullsize Belial puppet is also seen in the scenes where Belial is seen with an actor or where his eyes glow red. The famous Belial rampage sequence used stop motion animation. [3]
