Summary:
Following the events of “Basket Case 2”, Duane recovers from his delusional breakdown and learns that Belial will soon become a father.
My Thoughts:
The original “Basket Case” is awesome. Its wild schlocky fun, complete with absolutely ridiculous acting, brutally bloody special effects, and it’s a wondrous display of low budget filmmaking. “Basket Case 2” felt like Henenlotter (“Brain Damage”) was using the mild success of the original as an excuse for a cash grab, and “Basket Case 3” feels like Henenlotter had given up completely.
“We’re gonna need a bigger basket!”
To say this movie has a plot is a stretch, what it has are three or four plot points that are stretched out to make an hour and twenty minute movie. There are so many scenes in this film that are thrown in simply to take up time, like, for example, the inexplicable musical number as Duane (Kevin Van Hentenryck, “Brain Damage”) and Granny Ruth (Annie Ross, “Short Cuts”) drive the freaks across town in a bus. The first five minutes is lifted directly from the last five minutes of “Basket Case 2”. There’s another scene that takes place right after a hostage negotiation, where Granny Ruth suggests, for no reason whatsoever, that they all go out for dinner. The following scene is a three to five minute montage of the freaks running around this restaurant and destroying it while Ruth spews a never-ending order at a harried cashier. Are we the viewers supposed to find that funny? I’m not sure.
There are a few scenes that really worked for me, which is why I couldn’t give this any lower than a 2/5 star. The best scenes, in my opinion, were the birthing scene and the police station scene. The birthing scene was easily the funniest part of the movie, or, more accurately, the overreactions of the man filming the birth were easily the funniest part of the movie. The police station scene felt more in line with the original film than any of the other scenes in this movie. That scene had some pretty neat body horror effects, and Duane’s acting is particularly funny during that scene. Towards the end of the movie Belial’s buddies make a machine for him that is a direct reference to the fight at the end of “Aliens”, and while the scene wasn’t perfect, I must admit it got a chuckle from me.
For the most part, I found this movie to be pretty boring. Where in “Basket Case”, a fair amount of action and dread is sprinkled throughout the film, not a lot happens up until the very end of this movie. For the most part, our characters just behave bizarrely, and not in a way that I found particularly interesting. Many of the freaks from “Basket Case 2” make another appearance in this movie, but though they have names, none of them really have personalities. I feel like Henenlotter was trying to start a franchise with recognizable characters, but Belial is no Freddy Kruger (“A Nightmare on Elm Street”); he doesn’t have enough personality to carry a franchise, nor do any of the members of Belial’s adopted family. The freaks introduced in “Basket Case 2” felt particularly when compared to Belial; they reminded me a lot of the clowns in “Killer Klowns from Outer Space”. Neither the clowns nor the freaks are particularly scary or humorous; in the end I just feel bad for the actors that had to sit in makeup for hours to get into those prosthetics.
Verdict:
I still think the original “Basket Case” is absolutely worth watching. For people who like low budget b-horror movies like “The Toxic Avenger” or Cronenberg body horror (“The Fly”, “Scanners”) or splatter comedies like “Evil Dead”, the original is a must see, but the other entries in Henenlotter’s trilogy will appeal to a very narrow audience. I personally would’ve been fine only seeing the first movie, but I’m sure some people obsessed with the quirky characters in these flicks. In my opinion this movie was pretty boring, with only one or two redeeming scenes.
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