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7-30-04: Movie Review: Basket Case 2
Freaks aplenty.
This is not a good movie. Basket Case 2 is a cheap horror flick with virtually no redeeming qualities: there's a few mildly interesting scenes and characters, but on the whole it's just weird and gross, and no one in the movie can act worth a crap -- least of all our "menacing" anti-hero Duane (played by the bland Kevin VanHentenryck) who's about as scary as a pile of spinach.
The movie picks up immediately after the first Basket Case. We quickly meet Duane and his "brother" Belial, who are both lying half-dead on the street after having been knocked out of a window. Belial is the real star of the show: he used to be joined to Duane's hip until surgeons removed him. Basically he's just a lumpy piece of flesh -- two scrawny arms and a deformed head. Despite his lack of legs (or any other limbs that might give him the means to move about on his own) he's nevertheless surprisingly adept at murdering people five times his size. He's so small, in fact, that Duane carries him around in a basket. Hence the title.
The two are sent to a hospital and escape about five seconds later thanks to some of Belial's well-timed but improbable killings. Two other folks give them a hand -- an old lady named Granny Ruth and a girl named Susan, who help them out in the interest of "freaks rights". They think freaks get a bad rap, so they spend their time collecting them and bringing them to a safe house, sort of like Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. The students here, though, don't have superpowers -- they just look weird. One has giant sharp gopher teeth that jut out about three feet, and one has seven noses. All of them have weird-shaped heads, and some of them are like Belial and can't really be classified at all. Of course, they're all puppets, and some of them aren't very good, but one or two of them are at least cleverly animated.
While Belial makes friends with the freaks, Duane spends his days hitting on Susan and wondering if he belongs there, since he's not technically a freak anymore. Meanwhile, Granny Ruth looks for more freaks and more freak-haters (freaks, of the kind described above, are apparently commonplace in the bizarro world of this movie) and when she finds the freak-haters, she sends her personal army of freaks to kill them. This happens quite a few times, and if you ask me it's kind of a flawed strategy for a freaks rights activist. Aren't people more likely to hate freaks if they're always killing people in gruesome ways?
The biggest chunk of the movie, though, follows a reporter who wants to find Duane and Belial and do a story on them (both of them are wanted by the cops). She tracks them down to Granny Ruth's place, which really annoys the good Granny; she doesn't want any publicity. The reporter can't leave well enough alone, however, even after the freaks kill her cameraman, and eventually they simply visit her at her home and carve up her face so that she'll be a freak too. Oooh, the irony.
Duane finally asks the seemingly-normal Susan to run away with him, but after he discovers she's pregnant with a worm or something (don't ask) he totally loses it and stitches Belial back on to his side. The end.
The bad acting and writing were plenty annoying, but the character of Duane was probably the worst thing about the movie. He constantly whines, has bad hair, and likes to deliver grand platitudes about "who the real freak is". The movie tries to make him both wickedly psychotic (he usually orchestrates the attacks on the freak-haters and the cops that are after him) and sympathetic at the same time, which simply does not work.
As a cheap horror flick, the gore ought to be a drawing point -- well done if not particularly imaginative -- but Basket Case 2's gore is just run-of-the-mill crap. There's nothing special here. The puppets and costumes are all right, I guess, but not worth watching the movie for.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this review, I haven't seen the original Basket Case. Ant tells me that this sequel is about a hundred times better than the first one, and that Basket Case 3 has its moments as well. I wasn't impressed with this awful movie, and I don't think I'll be watching any of the others any time soon.