Dwayne Bradley (Kevin Van Hentenryck) carries a basket around with him. He tells his landlord (Robert Vogel) that it contains "clothes", but that's not quite true. The secret of the basket is fiendish, nasty and is liable to tear your face off if you stand in its way. (And there's a plot that's sort of like "The Abominable Dr. Phibes" in the way Dwayne tracks down the doctors...)
This film is very obviously low-budget, costing only $33,000, but the director (Frank Henenlotter) does not let that distract him. In fact, he almost turns it into a joke, using his friend's apartment as a makeshift "hotel". He has Dwayne carrying a large sum of cash, but is actually rather small when you know that it represents the actual budget of the film. And to make the film appear more professional than it was, they even faked the credits. As one trivia site explains, "The crew was very small and rather then repeat the same names over and over again they decided to just make up names."
There's something of a time capsule effect in this film. Much is filmed on 42nd Street in New York, during its porn and hooker glory years. You won't see that anymore, but you can forever see it in this film. And one scene is filmed in the basement of the legendary sado-masochistic Hellfire Club, complete with real-life glory holes. (To see what the club looks like now, you can see it on the DVD features.)
I think this movie must set the record for most times the phrase "what's in the basket?" is used in a single film. I'm surprised it's not the film's tag line, because I think I counted six instances. I'm not sure if it's supposed to be a running joke or if the writer is just that uninventive. (For fun, if you're a smoker, have a cigarette each time someone asks. That will be almost as much fun as the "In the Mouth of Madness" smoking game!) Some scenes are fairly cheesy. The puppetry is amateur and the claymation is like something from "Pee-Wee's Playhouse" (yes, not even good enough to be compared to "Clash of the Titans"). I enjoyed this and totally let it slide (cheesy effects from the 1980s are still better than modern computer effects in many cases).
For some reason, I really enjoy male nudity in movies (ask about my love of the films of Gregg Araki). I'm not gay or anything... I'm all about the ladies. But something about male nudity still comes off as a special thing in movies, maybe because I've seen just about all you can see in life and this still remains a rarity. Well, anyway, this film has some unusual male nudity that leads to the film's climax (pun intended) and I think you'll want to be there when it happens.
Oh, and mullets. If you're hankering for a Jeff Goldblum mullet (the hair from "The Fly", not "Jurassic Park") you really need to see this one. It's actually more like the hair of noted linguist and psychologist Steven Pinker.
Mike Mayo calls the film, "One of the all-time great low-budget horrors" that "is an ingeniously twisted original in every respect." It is one of the few horror films that Mayo has praised with four out of four bones on the Videohound rating scale. And with good reason. When it comes to low budget, few if any films get this big with so little -- "Basket Case" is a modern classic, and decades later can still be found on the shelves of many video stores. And what other film has mutant Siamese twin necrophilia?
I went almost 25 years without seeing "Basket Case". Don't make that same mistake. While this is not the greatest horror movie and not my favorite Henenlotter film, it has found its way into cult horror history (admit it, even if you never saw it you've still heard of it). This happens for a reason, and after watching maybe you'll understand what that reason is. At the very least, you'll find out what's in the basket.
