BASKET CASE (1982) is one of those cult movies everybody knew about in the ‘80s and ‘90s. It stayed alive by having a couple sequels and being in video stores or being mentioned often in Fangoria. Now it’s on 4K disc and on Shudder with credits saying it was restored by the Museum of Modern Art. But it was genuinely a creature of the grindhouses, a $35,000 exploitation movie conceived in Times Square by twentysomething New Yorker Frank Henenlotter, written on napkins at Nathan’s Famous, and shot in 16mm, partly in front of XXX theaters on 42nd Street. The producer was a hospital administrator whose only other films are Henenlotter’s and two yoga videos.
It opens with a mysterious murder at a house out in Glen Falls, before cutting to Times Square and a strange young man named Duane Bradley (Kevin VanHentenryck), who carries a large wicker basket. He checks into a shitty hotel, the kind where the v-neck undershirt-wearing clerk asks, “Couple of hours, couple of years, what? Give me a hint.” It’s twenty dollars a night up front and the lobby is crowded with residents gossiping about the death of somebody named “Dirty Lou.” (read the rest of this shit…)
