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
Ernie - 2010-08-26 11:31:44
I remember when this one came out. They had a promotional thing at the theater where if you went to see it they'd give you a white surgical mask with the movie's logo emblazoned on it in red. My friend Joe and I were watching the movie and we just kind of started making fun of it and all its absurdity and cheesy sleaze. Eventually some people heard some of our jokes and snide comments and, instead of calling the ushers and kicking us out, they started laughing at our remarks. Soon we weren't the only ones issuing snarky remarks. We were joined by half the people in the theater in a huge "snark-fest", if you will. (Chris Hardwick and Daniel Tosh would have been proud of us.) We actually got applause when the movie ended. A man said to me afterwards that he'd never laughed so much at a horror movie before. That being said, this is a truly bad movie, but one that's so bad it's good. You know, I wouldn't buy it on DVD but for a night of watching bad horror movies it'll do the trick.