Basket Case (1982)

(In French, On Cable TV, March 2021) As much as I dislike slasher movies with knife-wielding antagonists, it doesn’t take all that much improvement over the basic formula for me to give at least a nod of recognition at the ambition. Basket Case, for instance, is at its core a formula slasher — it does have a serial killer running around, it has victims falling dead every fifteen minutes or so, and it has the dark gritty aesthetics characteristic of the genre at the time. But it goes go farther and crazier — the prime example being what’s in the basket that the protagonist lugs around: his deformed conjoined twin, featuring delightfully twisted special effects once it starts killing people. That’s an unusual relationship all right, and it’s bolstered by an unusually strong sense of atmosphere as the characters lurk down the mean streets of early-1980s Manhattan. Basket Case is not, to be clear, a particularly good or likable horror film — it’s low-budget, gory and often unpleasant. But writer-director Frank Henenlotter does distinguish himself in a genre when it’s all too frequent for films to be both repellent and forgettable.