Basement Jack

A serial killer, nicknamed Basement Jack because of his penchant for hiding out in his victim's basements before killing them, is released and returns to the small town of Downer's Grove to continue his massacre and finish off the one victim who was able to escape is slaughter years before.

This film desperately tries to be a throwback to 80's slasher films, but it is too slow-paced and padded with the killer's backstory that it commits the worst crime a slasher film can: it becomes boring. The pace does pick up in the end and there are some ambitious attempts at heavy gore; however, it is extremely fake looking and some is obviously CGI. However, the director is able to create some nice atmosphere is spots and, despite the fake looking gore, the film looks great. In the end, though, this is nothing you haven't seen before and it has been done much, much better.

FrightMeter Grade: D+

Young man is tortured with a 9 volt battery by mother as a kid and turns into a killer only during thunderstorms.

If you buy into that premise, you might also like the bad acting, horrible script, the dead victims whose eyes are literally blinking and moving on screen, and storms without rain.

I didn't.

Characters actions simply don't make sense. Not sure if you've ever licked a 9 volt battery. I have. It doesn't hurt in the slightest. You feel a dull tingle. That's how we'd test to see if they were good as kids. None of us turned into serial killers.

And why do so many of the corpses move when they're supposed to be dead?

Didn't anyone see this during the editing?

IMDD says this movie had a million dollar budget.

Where did the money go?

Let me start off by saying this movie is not the best movie out there by any means.

Its story is interesting at best and it really tries to make the killer have a personage and back story, so that you do not just see him as another murderer. On the other hand the actor playing Jack does a horrible job. To illustrate how horrible I thought his performance was, I will describe it this way: Every time I saw him on screen I wanted to gouge out my eyes with a spoon and jam chopsticks into my ears to pierce my brain so I would no longer have to see or hear anything he does ever again.If it were up to me I would run him out of town and never let him work again. Over the top? Maybe. You be the judge. It seems the only godsend of this movie was Michelle Morrow the actress playing Karen Cook. In my opinion, in these types of movies the killer should outperform the others in the sense of acting skills, but the exact opposite was the case. She was the star of the film hands down and the others are forgettable.

The only reason to see this movie is to get a chuckle out of the acting. It is a rent at best.

BASEMENT JACK is another cheap slasher movie, an independent straight-to-DVD effort that looks and feels exactly the same as at least a dozen others. It has the old greyed-out colour palette look going on, alongside a non-threatening villain, lots of cheap gore effects, and a strictly pedestrian narrative.

The titular character is a psychotic who choses bad weather as a time to go around menacing innocent families. There are a lot of scenes shot in rooms filled with blood sprayed over the walls and the like, but the emphasis is on graphic kill sequences as Jack goes around slaughtering all in his path.

He's an irredeemable villain, but the kills have zero impact because there's no characterisation here whatsoever. There is some talk in an attempt to build a proper story, but none of it is very interesting. The best cast member they could come up with is Tiffany Shepis, who started out as a Troma starlet. I found BASEMENT JACK tired and distasteful, and I couldn't help wondering why I was bothering to watch it.

Basement Jack was tortured by his mother growing up before he kills her and goes on a killing spree murdering family's during storms. He is released and the murders start up again. Yeah this is low budget but you can really tell the director tried with this. It was shot well and it had some good gore. All the acting is pretty terrible bar the main girl and weird choices were made like having a British speaking police officer in a small American town. It tried a little too hard in parts with some humor like the porn watching scene at the police station but the killer was suitably creepy and the gore was good for the budget they had.