Frank Henenlotter deserves at least this much credit: he has not lied about what went on in the creation of Basket Case 3: The Progeny, and he does not pretend that it turned out perfectly well. Basically, 1990's Basket Case 2 went so well that he and everybody else wanted to get a jump on a third film as quickly as possible, and so he barreled into writing a new story without really having an idea for what he wanted that story to do. It's not that Basket Case 3 went into production without a finished script, it's not that kind of catastrophic seat-of-our-pants production, but it went into production without any purpose other than "more Belial, please!" And that is very much reflected in the final product. Basket Case 2 is a wild, wild swerve away from the original 1982 Basket Case, approaching the material from such a thoroughly different perspective, with such a completely different tone, they barely feel like two films in the same series, by the same creator. Basket Case 3 is absolutely nothing else but "more of Basket Case 2". And given that my response to Basket Case 2 was already that it's more interesting as an unexpected zig-zag from the original film than it is as a movie in its own right, you can probably guess that a film which basically doubles-down on all the things it was doing isn't exactly the kind of thing that's prone to setting my world on fire.

The first sign of how little inspiration is going into this third entry comes right at the start: the film opens with a lengthy repeat of the end of the preceding film. Not a recap, which is annoying enough on its own, but an understandable part of the job of sequels. It simply re-runs the last several minutes of Basket Case 2, unaltered, so we can see once more how Duane Bradley (Kevin Van Hentenryck) went a little crazy upon realising that his love interest Susan (Heather Rattray) had some manner of mutant six-year-old wormlike fetus inside of her; we can see once more that Duane's formerly conjoined brother Belial, a mass of teeth and limbs, was having comically bizarre sex with a woman sharing his physical condition; we watch once more as Duane, driven to certainty that he and Belial are one being, unfairly ripped apart, crudely sews his brother back onto his abdomen. Given that Basket Case 3 only clocks in at 90 minutes, seeing all of this feels like a bit of a cheat like the filmmakers figured out early on that they could get things up to feature-length much faster, the more they unnecessarily repeated.

And unnecessary it mostly is; Duane's (inadvertent?) murder of Susan, which certainly felt at the time like it ought to be a pretty big deal, ends up not informing any of what follows. Granny Ruth (Annie Ross), who runs this home for "unique individuals", and who was Susan's grandmother, locks Duane in a prison cell in her basement for months, but this seems more for his own protection than anything else. And by the time we start seeing newly-shot footage, Belial has already been separated from Duane again, and is extremely cross with his brother. This makes it tough when Ruth puts both of them, and the rest of her extended family of deformed persons, into a big retired school bus and drives everybody down to Peachtree County, GA, where an old friend of hers, Dr. "Uncle" Hal Rockwell (Dan Biggers) lives with his own "unique" son, Little Hal (Jim O'Doherty), and will provide medical support and a safe haven for Eve, Belial's lover, to give birth to whatever brood they've conceived together.

That's a solid enough set-up, but Basket Case 3 doesn't end up knowing what to do with it. The subtitle The Progeny, and an ad campaign focused on a terrifying-looking baby carriage full of menacing creatures, both suggest a very different direction for the film than it takes, at any rate, though I'd hardly be able to tell you what direction it does take. It's nowhere clearer that Henenlotter was basically winging it than in how scattered and ad hoc the subsequent narrative events are: the Peachtree Country law enforcement, under Sheriff Griffin (Gil Roper), takes an immediate suspicion to Ruth, and this suspicion seems to be confirmed when Duane flees the schoolbus to start flirting with Griffin's daughter Opal (Tina Louise Hilbert), wherein "flirting" means "ranting incoherently about monsters and his own terrifying brother". Meanwhile, Belial loses his mind at seeing Uncle Hal in surgical gear, and badly mauls the doctor. There's no end of plot events here, but they don't build upon each other; the film seems to just be filling out complications long enough that it can get to the point where Belial and a whole police station full of cops square off, with Belial having by that point armed himself in a way that I would never dare spoil, though not because I thought it was a great idea.

In fact, it's one of the main examples of what I'd consider to be the primary problem with Basket Case 3: it's trying to compensate for its lack of ideas by being extremely zany. Comedy already entered this series with Basket Case 2; horror now exits, leaving only comedy behind. One of the other things Henenlotter has admitted to is that this was supposed to be a much gorier film, but the producers asked him to tone things down. This had the immediate and terrible side-effect of leaving kills feeling weirdly neutered, but the kills are still in the movie. Notoriously, a cop is killed by squeezing his body till his eyes pop out of his skull; the eye popping is still there, but the stage blood that would have sold the effect isn't, so it's one of the most shockingly stupid-looking violent moments in a '90s "horror" movie, more like one of those rubber dolls whose eyes bug out than anything ever meant to engender an actual response of terror and disgust from a viewer. That's certainly the worst of it, but there's a general sense of the movie not knowing what do with all of its leftover horror elements, as if the change came too late in the process to rewrite anything, so we still get the set-up and staging of a gross-out movie but the gross-out moments have been snipped away. It leaves a profoundly hollow feeling behind.

The only thing trotted out to replace that hollow feeling is comedy: tons of braying, loud, hyperactive comedy. Henenlotter hasn't said this much, to my knowledge, but it feels clear enough that this is a desperation tactic, the same exact strategy as a scrawny teenager who, when confronted with a disapproving glare from a teacher or a looming bully, hopes that by acting silly and weird they can at least be confusing enough to escape unscathed. It's trying to fill all the holes in the screenplay by mugging and hamming it up and throwing out full-scale musical numbers. Annie Ross, bless her, seems willing to commit to this, and so she turns Ruth up all the way into full campy diva mode. Kevin Van Hentenryck has been cut out of this, thankfully, by building his entire subplot around the exact limitations he's demonstrated as an actor, so all of his glassy-eyed staring and motor-mouthed non-delivery of lines feel appropriately suited to the content.

But Henenlotter proves to be a fairly unsteady of director of comedy, as opposed to layering jokes into something more serious and nasty-minded, and his one strategy, demonstrated all across the film's running time, is: go big. Go all the way into flailing about absurdly and screaming out jokes and generally letting everybody feel like kids who've just had a whole big think of Kool-Aid, and hope that the constant business will at least give the film some kind of discernible personality and identity. And, to be very fair it does: it's just that the personality is one that I find extremely grating and off-putting. It's a hell of a long way from the vigorous bleak-hearted dark humor of the first Basket Case, so far that it no longer feels appropriate to yoke them together. I am by no means happy that Henenlotter's directiroal career basically stopped for over 15 years after Basket Case 3 - he's too creative and bold a visionary weirdo to feel good about losing his voice for so long - but I'm wholly relieved that he never saw fit to end that exile by pitching a Basket Case 4.

Body Count: 10, a series high, which isn't enough to compensate for how much safer they feel.

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.

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