BASKET CASE!!!

[If you're just joining us, welcome. What's going on here is, I spend every October reviewing horror movies. It's called the Shocktober Spectacular. If that's not your bag, come back in November, when I get back into the normal swing of things. Like making fun of the poor.]

You know how sometimes you’re flipping though the cable stations late at night, and you’re unlucky enough to flip by HBO during one of those Real Sex documentaries at the exact moment that a circle of old naked men are wearing Indian headdresses and standing around a campfire? You wish you could un-see it, but you can’t. Stretch the shock of that eyeball trauma over 90 minutes, and that’s what Basket Case is. 90 minutes of old man penises.

My friend Kevin has heard me talk about this movie for years, but I’ve never pulled the trigger on it. When I finally confirmed that the movie’s main villain was a head and arms, it became pretty obvious that I wouldn’t be leaving the video store with anything else. The joke was on me, however. I’ve been where few men dare to go, and I’ve seen things that would turn the very soul the darkest black, but I’ve never seen anything like Basket Case. I mean, this shit is bananas. B-a-n-a-n-a-s.

I’m going to tell you what Basket Case is about in as few sentences as possible, and please understand that I’m not making any of this up. Basket Case is about a guy who was born with an extra head and pair of arms growing out of his side—an incomplete conjoined twin. The head and arms were amputated but somehow continued to live, despite not having what scientists refer to as a “respiratory system” or “organs.” In the movie, the normal-looking other brother walks around with this glob of play-doh in a wicker basket, unleashing him on the doctors who performed the amputation years ago. The ball of paper mache kills them in ways that defy the very laws of sanity, as we’ll discuss in a bit, but DO NOT LET THIS DISSUADE YOU. If I ever, ever have a head and arms growing out of my side, I’m giving you permission to amputate immediately it with whatever you have on hand. A knife, a spoon, your wallet, a Nintendo controller, I don’t care. That was my problem with Basket Case from the get-go: why would you want to kill the people that saved you a lifetime of P.E. class shower humiliation? From me you’d get a Playstation II and bottle of Dom in the mail as thanks for the operation, plus a lifetime of gratitude. If, immediately following, a head and arms did happen to show up and kill you, I promise you I would have had nothing to do with it.



It's almost impossible to understand what I'm talking about without a visual aid, so there you go. There were four things about Basket Case which I thought were absolutely hilarious. One: the "Basket Case," as we'll call him, had a head, so I'll buy that he had a brain, so I wouldn't really get that worked up if he just spent the whole movie beating people at chess. That, however, was not the M.O.. The thing has foot-long arms and no legs, and yet it spent the entire movie throwing couches around, breaking tables in half, and busting through more walls than Kool-Aid man. Plus, it ate packs and packs of raw hot dogs, even though it didn't have a stomach to digest them in or an ass to shit them out of. Two: since the budget of Basket Case is a few dollars over what you put in the meter today, the “Basket Case” is a disaster of terrible terrible stop-motion animation—either the animators forgot to include about 50 poses in between shots, or God gives all people born as just a head and arms the power to teleport across rooms as a consolation. Three: midway through the movie, the “Basket Case” escapes the basket. His brother finds him just 30 or so minutes later, on the other side of New York City. Someone with legs never could've walked to where he was that fast, which means the “Basket Case” had to have cabbed it. Not only is that a hilarious visual, but it probably really pisses Danny Glover off, with his whole “why can’t black people get a cab in New York?” thing. Apparently the pecking order among cabbies is white people, heads, and then maybe black people. Four, just like in the howevermany other movies I've reviewed, no one can defeat the "Basket Case," even though their kids probably spent all day Saturday kicking something about his size around a field before enjoying Capri Sun and orange slices.

Basket Case has put me in a serious quagmire. Reading the paragraph above, one would think that this would be right up my alley, but I got a really ill vibe from watching it. The movie didn’t laugh at itself, it took itself seriously, and seriously, it’s a pretty sick movie. The effects are horrible, the acting atrocious, and the film would’ve actually cost more if the sets would’ve been built out of Legos, but the tone is there, more speciffically, in the demented closeness and love between the normal human brother and his killer head counterpart . Basket Case is just not fun. In fact, it’s pretty depressing and hideous. 2 Jason heads worth of depressing and hideous.

Up next, Alice Sweet Alice for Liz, followed by Truth or Dare?, for mystery woman Stephanie.