For fans of ‘80s rubbery horror films, Basket Case 2 sounds great on paper. Exploitation auteur Frank Henenlotter follows up his own 1982 trash classic, a horror indie about the seemingly normal Duane Bradley and his deformed siamese twin Belial (a demonic monstrosity which Duane carries around in the titular basket). It’s really a Schwarzenegger and DeVito situation.
The saga continues here as the duo wind up at a secret house for other freaks run by an old lady (named Granny Ruth, god help me) and her daughter. The ensemble forms a makeshift family that is eventually forced to wage war against a sleazy supermarket tabloid. The film is a very feeble critique of tabloid journalism, which unfortunately overshadows an interesting metaphor for the contradictory impulses of exploitation filmmaking. Granted, all meaning is kind of obscured by some of the worst dialogue known to man (or mutant).
The good news is that Henelotter, paying homage to Tod Browning’s Freaks, runs wild with the opportunity to showcase these bizarre creatures living a secret domestic life in an unassuming suburban home. The makeup and effects are outlandish, delightfully unconvincing, and completely unhinged – there’s a man whose face is covered in noses, others with obscenely stretched and mushed heads, even a croaking frog dude.
But there isn’t a lot else to recommend here. The acting, writing, and cinematography are all embarrassingly amateurish, and it’s often unclear for whom we’re even supposed to be rooting (in a shitty script way, not an existential way). Worst of all, the film has none of the gritty menace of the original. In fact, when Basket Case 2 goes for subversive weirdness, it plays as helplessly goofy and unintentionally lame. In other words, where the film should’ve gone for David Cronenberg, it winds up as 3rd rate Tim Burton. An absolutely ridiculous, ghoulishly comic sex scene in the final reel is the just the tone that a better film would’ve employed throughout.
It does have a couple of good Staten Island jokes, though.
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