Basket Case was shot on the cheap and looks it - which is somehow appropriate for a movie largely populated by urban derelicts, flakes and marginal medicos. Writer/director Henenlotter dedicates the picture to Herschell Gordon Lewis and displays his obeisance to the Godfather of Gorefilms through a series of hyperbolically bloody scenes - some of which are plainly improbable but provide great stills for the horror mag crowd. In one killing, for instance, a victim's face gets shoved into a drawer full of scalpels lying flat on their side - when she re-emerges to face the camera, a whole bunch of the instruments are sticking out of her face. (You wanna guess whether that image shows up on the back of the DVD case?) In another sequence, you can see a murdered victim still breathing, though it's possible I didn't notice that detail back when I was watching on betamax.

Despite its sleaziness and grue, there's a strange sense of innocence to this picture. Some of this can be attributed to Henenlotter's enthusiasm for his material. From the opening shots, you can see the neophyte moviemaker digging the fact that he's making his first feature film, and it shows in the John Waters-ian details he includes: the fat identical twin nurses in the office of the scalpeled Dr. Kutter, for instance; or the profusion of smiley faces in the Brosnin apartment of friendly hooker Casey (Beverly Bonner), who receives a late-nite visit from an interested Belial; or the tourist's eye view of NYC that Sharon offers Duane ("We'll even buy you 3-D postcards and an 'I Love New York' tee-shirt," she says.)

Henenlotter works overtime at proffering in-yer-face movie moments - and I'm sure that most first-time viewers would agree that he succeeds in his goal - but unlike the "serious" exploitation of so-called "inspirational" films, Basket Case makes no claim of even the slightest veneer of respectability. It's about a world where people can get bloodily rend into pieces by a creature that by all rights shouldn't even be able to make it across the room, let alone leap on their shoulders and start clawing at their face - and where brotherly love is repped by an over-the-top killing spree. A movie world, in other words: one that's arguably more honest in its artifice than the pretend Jerusalem of the year's Big Easter Hit. . .