The Basket and Belial
To read my review of Basket Case from several years ago, click below.
Basket Case
I’ve written of this film before, and since childhood, its gritty, ugly, and shocking sleaze has been with me. I first chanced to see it on cable television in the same year it was released (or shortly thereafter). It undoubtedly imprinted troubling psychological traumas in my developing brain, and though I saw only a few minutes of it, I well remember—mostly—the bloody Dr. Kutter (Diana Browne) with surgical scalpels sticking out of her face. That’s an image that’s stayed with me all my life, and, much as the opening few minutes of Time After Time (1979) went a long way toward framing my life later—or informing my conscious self of the individual I was—so too did the mutant of the movie: the small, greenish, pudgy lump of flesh known as “Belial,” whom I’ve mutated into over the decades.
