Basket Case (1982)

One of the most memorable lines from Basket Case, director Frank Henenlotter's 1982 splatter, gross-out icon of a picture, is said by a blonde-headed receptionist, Sharon, (Terri Susan Smith), who has some rather tremendous...talents. She says,

"I know an awful lot of guys, Duane. But, you're different somehow."

(Boy, did she ever have him pegged!)

Another great line is when Dr. Kutter (Diana Browne) says to Duane: "You're the Bradley boy we separated...the freak." That was EXACTLY the wrong thing to say. As what happens later proves.

Basket Case is an American classic: a very gory horror film based on the old urban legend about "Edward Mordake" (the name is sometimes alternately given as Edward MorDRAKE), a fellow that hailed from British nobility, who had a demonic parasitic twin growing out f the back of his scalp. I believe he had to feed it. Maybe he tossed a few small animals into its gaping maw, who knows, but, it was said to be thoroughly "evil," in the sense that it whispered blasphemies to him about God and Hell and death, until he went mad and (Edward, that is) and killed himself. All of which is entirely true mind you.

Basket Case the film is about Duane Bradley (Kevin Van Hentenryck), a naive young man from upstate New York who appears in Times Square after the grisly, splatter murder of Doctor Liflander (Bill Freeman), wearing a backpack and carrying a strange wicker basket. He has a tremendous seventies white man's afro. What's in the basket, you may be wondering.

He checks into a sleazy motel full of drunks and low-rent women that seem like call girls or at the very least on their way down in the world, and we soon learn that he's carrying around his "brother" (named "Belial" in later sequels), which is a squat, legless, turd-shaped lump of green rubber with long arms, terrific, ripping claws, a pointed head, and weirdly baleful face, with pointed shark-like teeth and black eyes. They've come to enact revenge; both of them, you see, were at one time joined together, until their unfeeling, shitbag parents hired three unqualified doctors to separate them. Belial was presumed dead, and, though being a wondrous and astounding scientific specimen, was hastily tied into a trash bag and thrown in with the garbage cans. In other words, an absurd plot point.

But dead he most certainly was NOT, and he and Duane, after killing their father (Richard Pierce) with a spinning saw blade device, are raised by an Aunt (Ruth Neuman) and then go to find those damn doctors that separated them. To that end, they go to the Big Apple, Duane sticking out like a sore thumb as they pass the pimps and junkies and whores, and the XXX peep shows until they make their way to Hotel Broslin. Belial has a voracious appetite, and Duane has to feed him copious amounts of jumbo-sized hotdogs and cheeseburgers.

They go to visit a couple of different doctors and hunt down their prey. There's a lot of nice, gory killing, including a classic scene of a woman whose face is pierced by scalpels. Duane falls in love with the pretty blonde receptionist. He gets drunk with a black call girl (the late Beverly Bonner). Belial (both rubber puppet and animated versions) kills, in a most bloody and merciless fashion. It's all good, ugly, dirty fun.

Belial kills the dirty bum trying to rip his brother off and then trashes their hotel room. The ending is tragic, comic, grotesque, and as unremittingly weird and ironic and hopeless as the rest of this picture. Now, I won't lie to you: at times it can be slow. Performances range from bad to very bad, to utterly comic and cartoonish. Characters break out in over-the-top exclamations of dialog. Right before being butchered by a lumpy green blob.

Basket Case. See it. Savor it. It's all that, and an ugly little mutant man-thing, to boot.