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I was all set to like Basement Jack. Really. The cover image is a little goofy, but it's no secret that I have a soft spot for the little movie that could, especially indie horror. And the pre-credits teaser segment was pretty good. It threw a bunch of cliches at me, but subverted them at the same time, and I am a bear for subverting cliches. So many horror films act like they need to do something new. I like the ones that weave new clothes from old cloth. Alas, the film took somewhat of a nose dive in the second act, and floundered uncontrollably into a death spiral during the third. Let's take a look and see what happened to an otherwise decent concept.
The first cliche to come rolling off the screen is the tried and true "couple making out in a car hearing a news report on the radio about an escaped serial killer." Never mind the fact that no one listens to actual local radio anymore. But anyway. In this case, the girl in question, Karen, is the smart, in-charge one, and the boyfriend is the ditzy one who is despondent over the heavy-petting zoo closing early. They proceed into Karen's familial abode where they find - at this point I need you to guess the cliche. If you guessed they find her family sitting at the table, only to discover upon closer inspection that they are in fact quite dead, give yourself a gold star. If you also guessed that the killer is standing right there in the room, hidden in the shadows until the corpses are discovered, when he thereby moves out into the light to scare the shit out of everyone, move straight to the head of the class. You might one day be president of Platinum Dune Pictures. | During Karen's subsequent battle with Basement Jack (if your clicheometer didn't read "Karen battles Basement Jack" before I said it, you might want to take that sucker in to the shop) we learn some nice tidbits behind the poor boy's twisted psychology. It seems his mother was an eminent whackadoo who not only treated her porcelain doll as if it were real, but she beat her actual child for innocent offenses and subjected him to all manner of amateur electroshock therapies, from sticking a battery into his mouth to literally chaining him to a lightning rod. The histrionic mother is made bearable for the simple fact that she is essayed by Lynn Lowry, who in this reviewer's opinion can do no wrong. Even when she is performing sexual acts in front of her son, because he "needs to learn", not so much a cliche as a ridiculous deus ex machina for why Jack is horrified by intimate congress. |  Hey Karen: say bye to those coppers while you still can. |
After the battle, where something silly happens with Karen electrocuting Jack in a suspiciously scripted way, we flash forward in time an indeterminate number of years. Slightly over a decade, it is revealed later. We find Karen walking along a dusty road into a small town, and it is obvious she has turned into a hardcore vengeance-seeking badass chick. We know because she has her hair pulled back, is wearing a wife-beater, and consults the map she pulled out of her rucksack. Now I don't want to get down on Michele Morrow, who plays Karen. Boy, that sounded wrong. But anyway. Morrow is sparklingly gorgeous, and is an excellent actress. She goes from hardass to coquette to tortured survivor of violence in the blink of an eye, and you'll believe every second of it. 
Oh Lynn, even when you're chewing every available piece of scenery I still love you. | Unfortunately I cannot say the same for Sam Skoryna, who plays rookie officer Chris Watts, the newly-minted cop whom Karen wraps around her finger. I am sure Sam is a super-nice guy and a great actor, but he just doesn't pull his weight in this film. Next to the shining star that is Morrow, he comes off as a Burger King heat lamp. Not that it is entirely his fault. Every aspect of he police end of the film is wrong. All the scenes involving the local PD are over-written, under-directed, and sideways-acted. Even the mighty Tiffany Shepis can't salvage any of it (including her oddly ill-fitting police uniform). Most distressing is the total wasting of Joel Brooks, a wonderful character actor whose IMDb credits show that he has done a bit on literally every TV show that ever mattered to me as a kid. |
| Once Karen begins interacting with the cops and the focus is taken off of her and put onto Officer Watts, the movie falls apart. Jack's flashbacks of abuse get hokier and less poignant, and the present-day murders he commits are an object lesson in low-wattage visual effects. Which is especially distressing when you note that first-time feature director Michael Shelton has worked make-up, special effects, and visual effects on some high profile genre films. But when Jack goes all Benihana in the police station, the painted-in knife looks painfully bad. Low-budget filmmaking is all about using what you have. Hell, Nathan Schiff's SFX usually consisted of Bisquick for flesh and cotton batting for intestine. Word to the wise: genre fans would rather see a clumsy edit than a clumsy CGI effect. |  Is that the jaw of your crazy mom's porcelain doll on your face or are you just glad to see me?
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And speaking of that cop shop blood slop scene, Shelton perpetuates my single biggest complaint in any film, genre or otherwise, indie or Hollywood: after wordlessly slaughtering motherfuckers left and right without a moment's hesitation, Jack MERELY BEANS WATTS ON THE HEAD AND SETTLES FOR LEAVING HIM UNCONSCIOUS. Oh, come on. What. The. Fuck. You may as well have rolled the credits right then, for all I cared about the rest of the proceedings. But I digress.  This guy may be an agent of Satan, or just a random douchebag. | What we have here, in a nuthsell, is a decent concept that was stretched out like taffy and stuffed full of preservatives. Karen is a badass chick and Jack is a sympathetic but deranged serial killer. Play them cat and mouse off each other with some cops getting owned in the middle, and you have a taut 80-minutes that I can get behind. But Jack ends up being an emotionally stunted killer with a psycho-sexual disorder who is terrified of electricity yet only strikes during lightning storms, and the focus is taken off of Karen and placed on the less interesting Watts, and throw in a mysterious character who may or may not be the devil, and the scale tips towards overburdened and the tension falls apart like a cake left out in the rain. Even the scenes with Lowry as the mom, which are by far the most well-shot and artistic scenes in the film, occupy way too much of the running time and roadblock the tension several times.
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Less is more with low-budget horror films. Word to your mother. (see what I did there?)
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