Sunday, October 2, 2022

October Horror Challenge 2022 #7: "Basket Case (1982)"

I've heard about this movie many times throughout my life. It's a favorite of horror fans, but I've just never gotten around to actually watching it. I did fall asleep during it once but I don't count that (though it made for some really weird dreams). I decided that the challenge this year would be the perfect time to finally check the movie out.

SPOILER ALERT: So this movie is about a boy and his basket. More specifically, it's about a rather normal-looking young man who carries a basket around with him and seeks revenge for an unwanted surgery performed on him as a child that separated him from his deformed conjoined twin, who he now carries around with him in said basket. Hence the title "basket case," get it? The twins communicate telepathically, and they slaughter their way through town, ammassing a respectable body count before they're finished. Will someone be able to stop the killings before it's too late?

I really wish I could go back and watch this movie back before I knew anything about it, before I knew what was in that basket. I bet it would have been really fun to see that reveal without knowing everything that was going to happen. We know from the beginning that SOMETHING is in the basket, simething that seems to be alive, and we see the young man (named Duane) feed it some hamburgers, so it seems to be his pet of some kind at first, but of course we astute viewers already know what it is in the basket, and descriptions of the movie don't even try to keep that a secret anymore and they dont even bother including a spoiler alert like the one I included here, since it's now common knowledge what's in the basket that young Duane is carrying, so there's no reason to try and keep it secret. The movie doesn't reveal what's in the basket for awhile though, and the full story of the origin of the thing in the basket isn't revealed until halfway through the movie. I guess it just would be nice to be surprised by something in the movie without having everythinng spoiled for me.

The stop-motion animation used to create the special effects of the murderous conjoined twin looks pretty hokey now, but they're still pretty cool effects. There's lots of messy gore, and most of the people who get killed are total assholes who deserve it, so it's fun watching them get dispatched in gruesome ways by the deformed brother named Belial. I kind of feel sorry for Belial. He's been hated his entire life and he grew u with only his brother to interact with, and it would seem that what he wants most is to be normal and have a normal life, so he resents anything that his brother has that he can never have, which is why he throws such a huge fit any time his brother gets to enjoy somethinng normal and fun in life that Belial can never have, like a girlfriend. Poor Belial. Anyway, I ended up enjoying this movie, so give it a watch if you've never seen it or if you want to be transported back to a simpler time in slasher cinema.

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