You know from the jump that BASKET CASE 2 (1990) is gonna have a little more money behind it than the first one, because it has both Troma and Shapiro Glickenhaus credits. That’s power right there. For those just joining it starts with footage from the end of part 1, with poor Duane and his murderous, surgically separated lump brother Belial hanging off a hotel sign, falling and splattering in front of screaming New Yorkers. We also get a news report from Times Square, describing Belial as “a small, grotesque monstrosity” and a “small, twisted deformity whose most startling feature is an unnervingly human face” and a “strange little being” that “might actually be human.”
An old lady, Grannie Ruth (Annie Ross, PUMP UP THE VOLUME), and her adult granddaughter Susan (Heather Rattray, “White House Press Conference Reporter [uncredited],” DEEP IMPACT) flip through the channels watching all the coverage, and seem to know who the Bradleys are, and they head to the hospital to free them. By that time though the boys have already escaped on their own and added to their crime spree. (Henenlotter pulls a HALLOWEEN II by having hospital staff hitting on each other before becoming victims.)
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.
