Chris versus Steve! Dull Blog Review Follows...

Rubbish Film Review Alert!

STOP THE PRESS: Cronenberg Crap - Henenlotter good but no one really knows who he is!

Ok – for anyone who has visited Steve’s weblog, Adventures in Uncinema, he boldly claims that I foolishly believe that Basket case 2 is a better film than David Cronenberg’s dead famous Dead Ringers. I stand by that claim.

Look! It's a proper film and everything...

It came about when we were at one of our irregular horror nights, a 7pm – 4 am screening of various horror films on a bog screen around at Gareth’s place and attended by us sad devotees or anoraks or whatever.

In the delirium of back-to-back horror film watching strange themes seem to emerge as films blur into each other: torture, duality, noses… that kind of thing, and then, after a night of Paul Morrisey’s Flesh for Frankenstein, Miike Takashi’s amazing Masters of Horror episode, obscure Japanese art-sex-horror Blind Beast we settled on a lighter comedy outing for a finale – Frank Henenlotter’s basket Case 2, a strange little gem of a black comedy I first saw at Manchesters Black Sunday Horror Film Fest many, many moons ago…

It’s remarkably unpretentious and with it’s twin, the earlier Basket Case, make a bold statement about duality and separation and ultimately loneliness.

I don’t want to look like a bigger cunt than I am, but while Cronenberg is waffling about Cartesian Duality in his laboured film, Henenlotter is just getting on with it.

Jeremy Irons isn't even a proper monster,
look at him - rubbish.

In Basket Case, Siamese twins of the oddest kind are separated, Duane from his ugly, frightening looking brother Belial, but somehow they are still linked… SPOILER ALERT… psychically they can never leave each other, one always aware of the others activity, however deranged or violent that might be… so while Duane might be the better looking one, he is as much a part of his brothers twisted mind and unable to escape his biological history… and in a remarkeable twist ending to Basket Case 2, Duane takes it upon himself to literally rejoin his ex-conjoined twin, sewing him back onto his side forever…

Belial - rubbish effects, but at least he's a proper monster,
look he's dead scary! And he doesn't thesp about on set,
demanding milkshakes and the like.

BC2 lacks the horror of it’s predecessor, lacks the ugly stop motion animation and frightening new York locations, but it makes up for it in two ways – first the hilarious make-up effects, a weird, unreal series of masks that exaggerate difference and make a virtue of low budget – and in some ways allow you to suspend your disbelief that in fact it’s bizarre team of freakazoids on display are not ‘handicapped’ but instead creatures of the imagination…

And secondly it extends it’s theme beyond duality and beyond the rigid confines of Cronenberg’s film.

It’s a Statten Island of Doctor Moreau! Annie Ross (the great Jazz Singer from Scotland) plays a kindly matriarch who has taken to boarding the ‘freaks’ away from the glare of hack journalists – but she has a dark side too and any hack getting near enough to snap pictures for cheesy newspapers is soon a victim to her army of others… So she ain’t such a saint after all.

In the end, everyone is revealed to be a freak of one kind or another… In Dead Ringers the themes are played out on a purely tonal level, people speak the themes occasionally, or dream them, but the film is all surface and not much fun at all really – everything is very dour and portentious throughout.

I may have cheated by comparing TWO films to Dead Ringers, but then Henenlotter has actually made THREE Basket Case films and Cronenberg has yet to deliver a sequel to his joke free twins flick… so the BC films are better value, too.

Anyway – not much of an argument and poorly spelt too. See you later when I rubbish another film and praise something really silly instead, like an inverted snob.

So there you go... I am right!