Duane and Belial communicate telepathically - which means we get a lot of scenes in the movie's first half of Duane arguing with to the silent basket. (Only sounds to emerge from the heavily fanged Belial are slavering growls.) The duo has arrived from upstate New York to the big city because that's where two of the doctors in question have their dubious practices. While checking out the first victim-to-be, a greasy low-rent sawbones named Needleman, Duane meets and falls for the office's goofy, big-eyed receptionist Sharon (Terri Susan Smith). Though he's still committed to carrying out gory vengeance, Duane also attempts to sneak in some wooing time with Sharon - but it's hard to be sneaky when your brother is telepathically conjoined to ya. The boy/girl relationship inevitably ends badly - no, make that, horribly.
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.)
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