Summer of Blood: Monster house
More than one filmmaker has burst onto the scene with one really good horror movie and built a career out of insubstantial remakes of that one movie. So for that alone, one must extend no small amount of credit to Frank Hennenlotter, whose 1982 debut feature Basket Case was rather more than just "one really good horror movie". If you can mentally compensate for the extremely low budget, which created some very specific problems for the movie that go above and beyond "unimpressive production value" right into "this is actually making the movie quantifiably worse" (the acting is atrocious, the monster effects wholly unconvincing), you're left with one of the few horror movies of that or any other era that is the work of a true visionary. If only for its singular presentation of 1980s Manhattan as a squalid pit where hope dies, matched with the very bizarre character psychology that emerges by gradual steps, the film made it clear that Henenlotter was operating on some wavelength all his own.
What's admirable is that he did not immediately take this as an opportunity to cash in. Offers to finance a sequel happened almost immediately, but Henenlotter wasn't interested in retreading the same ground. And so it went for eight years, during which time he made only a single feature, 1988's Brain Damage. Even when he finally gave into the clamor of appeals for a Basket Case 2, which was released in 1990, it was mostly on his own terms. The one thing the moneymen forced on him was that the film had be built around the same two main characters, formerly conjoined twins Duane Bradley (Kevin Van Hentenryck) and Belial (a large foam prop looking like a human being melted into a foot-tall pile of angry teeth). But other than that, Basket Case 2 is absolutely true to Henenlotter's insistence on not copying himself. For good or for bad (and I think there's a bit of both), this is absolutely not more of the same, not in terms of plot, setting, or tone; any viewer expecting the same raw nerves and pessimistic energy of Basket Case was sure to be disappointed, and indeed many of them were. Basket Case 2 has nothing close to the same cult appreciation that immediately accrued to its predecessor, and I can't honestly say that it seems like it ought to.
That being said, the film has its own unmistakable charms. Where Basket Case was a blackhearted, grungy thriller with a potent vein of dark humor, Basket Case 2 is a much loopier, more actively comic experience; in particular, the score by Joe Renzetti brings in multiple cues that have a romping, carnivalesque mood, making it extremely difficult to take the darkness of the rest of the story at all seriously. Which is a cue that we're not meant to take it seriously, perhaps. That's one of the two biggest shifts the sequel takes: it's not really confronting us with the horror of its story (the other is that instead of taking place in the real New York at its most foul and filthy, it takes place in New Jersey on sets that look like sets). It is much closer to a routine slasher film, in that we're obviously meant to take the side of the killer. Instead of grappling with a unique perspective on body horror (the terror comes from trying to carve out a "deformity" instead of embracing it as part of one's self), it treats body horror as fanciful stuff, more about sight gags than philosophy. The firm shift towards a comic aesthetic is overtly designed to put us in the new register Henenlotter has in mind, and accept this very different story on its own terms.
That new story, in short: Duane and Belial's misadventures from the first movie are a major news story, taking over every channel, and this brings them to the attention of Ruth (Annie Ross) and her granddaughter Susan (Heather Rattray). The twins escape from the hospital and police custody, and Ruth finds them shortly thereafter, bring them to her suburban home where she houses a large number of what she calls "Unique Individuals" - humans with bodily deformities that have left them branded as monsters in the greater world, but to Ruth, they're just people like anybody else. And indeed, she bet her entire professional career on that, back when she was a respected medical scientist, though her views left her an outcast from the field. A few years pass, and a tabloid reporter, Marcie Elliott (Kathryn Meisle) has decided it's high time that the fugitive Bradley brothers be found and brought to justice for the substantial number of bodies Belial tore through back in '82. Duane, meanwhile, is sick and tired of living in a house of human oddities, and is starting to royally piss off Ruth by talking about leaving. Besides which, Belial already made it clear in the first movie that his link with Duane precludes the latter leaving, or ever really living as an independent person. So in short order, Ruth's haven is beset from threats both internal and external, and while she has dedicated her life to telling her unique individual friends that they aren't scary monsters, she's certainly not ashamed to rally them to fight back against the prying eyes that Marcie starts to bring to bear, with gruesome violence if necessary.
There are a lot of interesting ways into this, several tensions between different goals: it's an exploitation movie that comes up with a good dozen creatively disgusting designs for its characters that puts the obvious foam prop from the first movie to shame, with an explicit message that there's nothing about so-called deformities that should define a person and it's a revolting tendency of society to gawk at people with non-normalized bodies; it's about the psychological comfort of assembling a found family, in which the matriarch of that family is revealed to be a bloodthirsty lunatic. It keeps reassigning sympathy throughout, so that at one point we're rooting for Duane to confess his love to Susan, and then mere seconds later joining her in recoiling from his selfishness in wanting to abandon Belial, before pivoting back over to understand why he'd obviously want to do that. The only character the film actively hates, Marcie, is the only one who's making the plainly correct argument that the protagonists are deadly murderers who butchered a half-dozen people horribly and never saw justice for it.
And, to be strictly fair, one of the most immediate ways into this is to note, "oh, it's just a remake of Freaks, isn't it?", copying substantial elements of the narrative structure and thematic concerns of director Tod Browning's second-best-known horror film, from 1932. Basket Case 2 isn't precisely broadcasting this fact - Freaks is nowhere credited as a source - but Henenlotter isn't exactly hiding it, either (his preferred title for the film was House of Freaks), and critics at the time noticed it pretty readily. It is, to be sure, impossible to miss, especially as Henenlotter starts to exactly re-enact the finale of the earlier film.
All of which is on one hand a bit of trivia, but it does speak to the bigger limitation of Basket Case 2 compared to its predecessor. Simply put, this doesn't feel like it has its own vision, and Basket Case had vision to spare. Henenlotter's worldview seemed to be puked up on the screen with furious violence in that movie, leaving us with one of the most distinctive horror movies of a generation. Basket Case 2 is secondhand goods, and it feels like it. More than anything else, it really does feel like a showcase for the make-up effects, which are remarkable, and all the more so since surely the film didn't have an especially high budget. There's no hint of realism - these are not plausible deformities, but garish fantasy movie creations - and outside of a few scenes where Duane or Marcie doesn't know what's going on, there's no hint of horror, either. It's just a celebration of grotesque creativity. And that's perfectly fine for the enterprising B-movie director only finally, after eight years, getting to make his third movie, and wanting to celebrate the grodiness of genre film. But "wouldja look at those prosthetics!" hardly qualifies as a revelatory experience, and even though the prosthetics in question completely wipe the floor with Belial in the first Basket Case, his presence there was more shocking and powerful, foamy texture and all.
That being said, as anything other than a sequel to Basket Case, Basket Case 2 is a largely well-built film. Just for the fact that it could come up with a way to make an approximate slasher movie narrative structure feel playful and fresh in 1990, by which point the slasher had completely died off for at least the second time in a decade, one has to admire the film's cheerful commitment to being itself. The lighter tone and more obvious embrace of wacky comedy, however violent and gross, helps a lot in selling Van Hentenryck's performance - he's not better than before, really, but he's being called upon to do much simpler emotional work, as the put-upon mediocre dork around whom the slasher movie plot and monster movie proesthetics swirl. And the rest of the cast is a massive improvement over the previous film, even if they're not always all that good in and of themselves (Meisle certainly isn't pushing past the clichés of her part). At the very least, it's quite unexpected, not just as a sequel, but as a 1990 horror movie that's so darn jaunty, willing to risk seeming goofy in between the violent shocks. I don't think that Henenlotter's status as one of the great cult horror directors of a generation is necessarily burnished by the existence of Basket Case 2, but it is at least not the work of a man who is in the tiniest bit lazy.
Body Count: 6, plus one apparent non-death that is entirely within the spirit of a body count kill.
Reviews in this series
Basket Case (Henenlotter, 1982)
Basket Case 2 (Henenlotter, 1990)
Basket Case 3: The Progeny (Henenlotter, 1991)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
What's admirable is that he did not immediately take this as an opportunity to cash in. Offers to finance a sequel happened almost immediately, but Henenlotter wasn't interested in retreading the same ground. And so it went for eight years, during which time he made only a single feature, 1988's Brain Damage. Even when he finally gave into the clamor of appeals for a Basket Case 2, which was released in 1990, it was mostly on his own terms. The one thing the moneymen forced on him was that the film had be built around the same two main characters, formerly conjoined twins Duane Bradley (Kevin Van Hentenryck) and Belial (a large foam prop looking like a human being melted into a foot-tall pile of angry teeth). But other than that, Basket Case 2 is absolutely true to Henenlotter's insistence on not copying himself. For good or for bad (and I think there's a bit of both), this is absolutely not more of the same, not in terms of plot, setting, or tone; any viewer expecting the same raw nerves and pessimistic energy of Basket Case was sure to be disappointed, and indeed many of them were. Basket Case 2 has nothing close to the same cult appreciation that immediately accrued to its predecessor, and I can't honestly say that it seems like it ought to.
That being said, the film has its own unmistakable charms. Where Basket Case was a blackhearted, grungy thriller with a potent vein of dark humor, Basket Case 2 is a much loopier, more actively comic experience; in particular, the score by Joe Renzetti brings in multiple cues that have a romping, carnivalesque mood, making it extremely difficult to take the darkness of the rest of the story at all seriously. Which is a cue that we're not meant to take it seriously, perhaps. That's one of the two biggest shifts the sequel takes: it's not really confronting us with the horror of its story (the other is that instead of taking place in the real New York at its most foul and filthy, it takes place in New Jersey on sets that look like sets). It is much closer to a routine slasher film, in that we're obviously meant to take the side of the killer. Instead of grappling with a unique perspective on body horror (the terror comes from trying to carve out a "deformity" instead of embracing it as part of one's self), it treats body horror as fanciful stuff, more about sight gags than philosophy. The firm shift towards a comic aesthetic is overtly designed to put us in the new register Henenlotter has in mind, and accept this very different story on its own terms.
That new story, in short: Duane and Belial's misadventures from the first movie are a major news story, taking over every channel, and this brings them to the attention of Ruth (Annie Ross) and her granddaughter Susan (Heather Rattray). The twins escape from the hospital and police custody, and Ruth finds them shortly thereafter, bring them to her suburban home where she houses a large number of what she calls "Unique Individuals" - humans with bodily deformities that have left them branded as monsters in the greater world, but to Ruth, they're just people like anybody else. And indeed, she bet her entire professional career on that, back when she was a respected medical scientist, though her views left her an outcast from the field. A few years pass, and a tabloid reporter, Marcie Elliott (Kathryn Meisle) has decided it's high time that the fugitive Bradley brothers be found and brought to justice for the substantial number of bodies Belial tore through back in '82. Duane, meanwhile, is sick and tired of living in a house of human oddities, and is starting to royally piss off Ruth by talking about leaving. Besides which, Belial already made it clear in the first movie that his link with Duane precludes the latter leaving, or ever really living as an independent person. So in short order, Ruth's haven is beset from threats both internal and external, and while she has dedicated her life to telling her unique individual friends that they aren't scary monsters, she's certainly not ashamed to rally them to fight back against the prying eyes that Marcie starts to bring to bear, with gruesome violence if necessary.
There are a lot of interesting ways into this, several tensions between different goals: it's an exploitation movie that comes up with a good dozen creatively disgusting designs for its characters that puts the obvious foam prop from the first movie to shame, with an explicit message that there's nothing about so-called deformities that should define a person and it's a revolting tendency of society to gawk at people with non-normalized bodies; it's about the psychological comfort of assembling a found family, in which the matriarch of that family is revealed to be a bloodthirsty lunatic. It keeps reassigning sympathy throughout, so that at one point we're rooting for Duane to confess his love to Susan, and then mere seconds later joining her in recoiling from his selfishness in wanting to abandon Belial, before pivoting back over to understand why he'd obviously want to do that. The only character the film actively hates, Marcie, is the only one who's making the plainly correct argument that the protagonists are deadly murderers who butchered a half-dozen people horribly and never saw justice for it.
And, to be strictly fair, one of the most immediate ways into this is to note, "oh, it's just a remake of Freaks, isn't it?", copying substantial elements of the narrative structure and thematic concerns of director Tod Browning's second-best-known horror film, from 1932. Basket Case 2 isn't precisely broadcasting this fact - Freaks is nowhere credited as a source - but Henenlotter isn't exactly hiding it, either (his preferred title for the film was House of Freaks), and critics at the time noticed it pretty readily. It is, to be sure, impossible to miss, especially as Henenlotter starts to exactly re-enact the finale of the earlier film.
All of which is on one hand a bit of trivia, but it does speak to the bigger limitation of Basket Case 2 compared to its predecessor. Simply put, this doesn't feel like it has its own vision, and Basket Case had vision to spare. Henenlotter's worldview seemed to be puked up on the screen with furious violence in that movie, leaving us with one of the most distinctive horror movies of a generation. Basket Case 2 is secondhand goods, and it feels like it. More than anything else, it really does feel like a showcase for the make-up effects, which are remarkable, and all the more so since surely the film didn't have an especially high budget. There's no hint of realism - these are not plausible deformities, but garish fantasy movie creations - and outside of a few scenes where Duane or Marcie doesn't know what's going on, there's no hint of horror, either. It's just a celebration of grotesque creativity. And that's perfectly fine for the enterprising B-movie director only finally, after eight years, getting to make his third movie, and wanting to celebrate the grodiness of genre film. But "wouldja look at those prosthetics!" hardly qualifies as a revelatory experience, and even though the prosthetics in question completely wipe the floor with Belial in the first Basket Case, his presence there was more shocking and powerful, foamy texture and all.
That being said, as anything other than a sequel to Basket Case, Basket Case 2 is a largely well-built film. Just for the fact that it could come up with a way to make an approximate slasher movie narrative structure feel playful and fresh in 1990, by which point the slasher had completely died off for at least the second time in a decade, one has to admire the film's cheerful commitment to being itself. The lighter tone and more obvious embrace of wacky comedy, however violent and gross, helps a lot in selling Van Hentenryck's performance - he's not better than before, really, but he's being called upon to do much simpler emotional work, as the put-upon mediocre dork around whom the slasher movie plot and monster movie proesthetics swirl. And the rest of the cast is a massive improvement over the previous film, even if they're not always all that good in and of themselves (Meisle certainly isn't pushing past the clichés of her part). At the very least, it's quite unexpected, not just as a sequel, but as a 1990 horror movie that's so darn jaunty, willing to risk seeming goofy in between the violent shocks. I don't think that Henenlotter's status as one of the great cult horror directors of a generation is necessarily burnished by the existence of Basket Case 2, but it is at least not the work of a man who is in the tiniest bit lazy.
Body Count: 6, plus one apparent non-death that is entirely within the spirit of a body count kill.
Reviews in this series
Basket Case (Henenlotter, 1982)
Basket Case 2 (Henenlotter, 1990)
Basket Case 3: The Progeny (Henenlotter, 1991)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
Categories: comedies, exploitation films, horror, sequels, slashers, summer of blood
