Don’t Look in the Basement
Just when I was beginning to fear that my impulse buy of horror movie collections on the cheap was about out of gas, I found another winner. This one I wouldn’t even dream of calling a good movie, let alone a “sorta good” movie. In fact, it’s pretty much a total crap movie. Weirdly enough, though, I still found myself getting a kick out of it. It’s like this movie succeeds by failing, and revels in it’s trashy heritage.
Dr. Stephens should really review his "let crazy folks play with axes" therapy. I'm not saying it's a bad idea or anything, but—you know what, on second thought, however you look at it, this is a terrible idea.
Dr. Stephens should really review his “let crazy folks play with axes” therapy. I’m not saying it’s a bad idea or anything, but—you know what, on second thought, however you look at it, this is a terrible idea.
Premise: 3/5
This movie’s premise is very stupid. Lemme break it down: there’s this guy, Dr. Stephens, who runs a private sanitarium that’s sorely understaffed (bad idea #1), and he’s decided maybe he needs an extra nurse. The day before she arrives, he’s out with a patient, encouraging him to whack a log really hard with an axe (bad idea #2). Exactly what you’d expect from a z-grade flick happens. Meanwhile, the nurse who was gonna leave anyways decides to double-time it out of there without calling the police (bad idea #3). Again, what you’d expect happens—although I certainly wasn’t expecting death by suitcase. I’ll admit to being caught off guard on that one. Then we fade to seeing our new, eye-candy nurse Charlotte Beale, heading towards the sanitarium to start her new career in a world of bad, bad ideas. As she arrives, the “other” doctor at the sanitarium, Dr. Masters, gives her an earful about how they don’t need a new nurse, blah blah blah, we’re like family, and so on. Somehow, despite hearing that a patient had just recently killed Dr. Stephens with an axe, and knowing how much Dr. Masters doesn’t want her here, and in fact hearing that creepy bit about family, Nurse Charlotte sweet-talks her way into staying on (bad idea #4—looks like Charlotte’s gonna fit right in!).
Anyways, that’s as much plot as this movie has—now all that’s left is to make you feel like more and more of a perv as you ogle Charlotte in her nurse’s outfit, and watch the crazy people hopelessly overact and fail to build any sense of dread. Good thing you don’t really need dread when you’ve got this creative giddiness about building a body count and ignoring all the rules of common sense! The movie may have a sucky plot and a silly premise, but it sure delivers on the “joy of being trashy” front. I suppose the movie, at one point, wanted to be sort of a gory whodunit slasher, but it telegraphs absolutely EVERYTHING too early in the movie for that to work.
And let me take just one second to talk about the title: it doesn’t make any sense in context with, well, with ANYTHING in the movie. The title card just seems tacked on at the beginning, and no one, under any circumstances, mentions anything about not going in the basement. In fact, maybe Charlotte should’ve gone in the basement a hell of a lot earlier and saved herself some strife. You know what’s in the basement? I’ll spoil the movie for you and tell you: it’s the damn door out of the sanitarium. Seriously. That’s it. I mean, there is one “plot” point down there but it’s just kinda redundant by the time Charlotte finally gets there.
HELLOOOOOOO Nurse!
Cast: 1/5
Does the cast really matter in an exploitation slasher like this? No, of course it doesn’t. This movie doesn’t have any goals, so casting is really irrelevant. The only things that the director needed, I guess, were a hot nurse and people who could shriek and make your eardrums bleed all movie long. What this movie lacks in competent acting it makes up for in sheer volume. Shrill screaming, hysterics, and allegedly insane (but mostly just annoying) laughter make up the bulk of what you hear in this movie, and for that reason alone you won’t be able to concentrate on how really bad all of these actors truly are—although you will curse your speakers until the end of time for inflicting this audial torment on you. And really, when the biggest star you have is an ex-playboy model, what else needs to be said? I mean, there’s “I’m insane” and “I’m a really shitty actor,” and this movie is all about the latter.
Lemme tell you who our cast of characters is, though, so you can at least get the level of the movie: there’s the idiot doctor who gets himself perished in the first ten minutes, there’s the guy they call “The Judge” who talks like he’s in a grade school Thanksgiving play, the huggable black lobotomized guy, the crazy girl who thinks this baby doll is her real baby, a nymphomaniac who’s well versed in the art of tearing her own shirt off, the guy who bounces around laughing like an obnoxious twit and steals crap, the old lady whose tongue thankfully gets cut out early in the movie so I don’t have to hear her awful voice and awful poetry anymore, a mousy girl who is just supposed to look spooky, I guess, the sergeant guy who keeps watching for “them,” and the cranky doctor lady who takes over after the first idiot gets killed, and finally the aforementioned Playboy gal who plays the new nurse on the block. I hope that was enough characterization for you, because that’s all the movie gives you, and there isn’t a single bright spot on the whole cast list.
I guess the guy who comes in to fix the phone is funny, only because of his overtly retarded dialogue. See, he comes out to fix the phone because of a “voltage drop” in the area, but then he asks Dr. Masters why she didn’t call to have them come out and fix the phone. Yeah, you read that right, the guy coming out to fix the phone asks “why didn’t you call us?” And better still is that there’s an exchange a little bit later when Dr. Masters asks why the phone company didn’t inform her in advance that they were coming out, to which he replies “I couldn’t call you lady, your PHONE is OUT.” I couldn’t make up baffling dialogue decisions like that, even if I wanted to!
Submitted for the approval of the Academy, I can't understand why this movie didn't win Best Picture.
Technical Bells and Whistles: 1/5
On the plus side, the camera usually seems to be pointed in basically the right direction most of the time. Also, there’s blood, and a neat little eye-impalement. On the downside, everything else blows. The movie just sort of meanders around from crazy person’s room to crazy person’s room, with vague implied menace, I suppose. The sets make spartan an understatement, and the attack scenes are more puzzling than frightening, like the overzealous “actors” keep accidentally bumping and shoving the camera guy around when they’re flailing away, and the more stuff happening, the worse it gets. There’s also a clearly broken plastic knife being used in one attack scene, and somebody gets the shit beat out of them with a baby doll. Yeah, it’s that kind of movie. And would somebody PLEASE tell those corpses to stop breathing and moving? The camera only needs to be on them a few seconds, and they can’t even get that right.
"My god...this movie's going to stay on my resume forever?"
Popcorn Factor: 4/5
Alright, this movie totally sucks ass, but I still had fun. I can’t explain it, but there was something compelling in the movie’s tacky crapfulness that kept me amused through the whole thing. There’s no real surprises in the movie (except for the death by suitcase I mentioned before), but that doesn’t matter. You know what’s gonna happen, but it’s still kinda fun to just guess exactly when you’ll see the next goofy act of atrocity committed. “Don’t Look in the Basement” is definitely not gonna scare you, but it should amuse you if you’re anything like me, and just love awfulness in all its forms.