MPAA Rating: R
Director: Frank Henenlotter
Starring: Kevin Van Hentenryck, Terri Susan Smith, Beverly Bonner
"Basket Case" Video
Ad for Basket Case: "The tenant in room 7 is very small, very twisted and very mad."
"I'll never be satisfied until I see every sleazy film ever made—as long as it's different, as long as it's breaking a taboo (whether deliberately or by misdirection). There's a thousand reasons to like these films. A film can be exciting because it deals with an impolite subject. In most horror films—just killing someone is an impolite enough thing to do . . . Often, through bad direction, a film starts assuming surrealistic overtones, taking a dreadfully cliched story into new frontiers—you're sitting there shaking your head, totally excited, totally unable to guess where this is going next . . . Anything that makes you think can't be bad! If you watch a cat being mutilated and react to it, you're going to think about why you are reacting to it. No one's going to sit there and just get off on it (if you are, you're such a sick fuck that it doesn't matter whether they put it on tape or not—you're a jerk anyway."
—Frank Henenlotter, quoted in Re/Search #10: Incredibly Strange Films, 1986