Originally Posted by Frankie Teardrop  THE BASEMENT – 'The Basement' has a slightly odd history in that it seems to have been partially made in the late eighties, shelved, then completed around 2010. It comes across as a fannish labour of love, an amateur production maybe a notch or two up from Nathan Schiff, but essentially operating out of the same backyard with the same dodgy 8mm camera. It's about four people who find themselves in a basement – or rather, in THE Basement. They meet a grim reaper type who tells them that they're going to have to face up to their 'future crimes', which we get to witness case by case as the film unfolds in portmanteau fashion. 'The Basement' is quite a jarring experience. It was obviously made by horror nerds (I notice J R Bookwalter gets a credit for something, and no-one but a horror geek is going to come up with a line like “fu*k you and fu*k George Romero!”). Alas, in this case the horror nerds in question appear to have no real feel for the terrain. Tonally, 'The Basement' veers from sophomoric humour to gory excess. I can take technically bad cinema (obviously), but it has to fall together on some level, or be potent or just aggravating... in the right way. 'The Basement' doesn't have any of this going for it. It has a few surges and delivers some visceral thrills, but then fires blanks and messes around. Some bad decisions were made on the post production side of things - the recently added dubbing for example, which unfortunately seems to be going for a 'humourous voice' angle and really harms the more serious bits. Aesthetically, a couple of the individual stories are just lame, like the opener with the swimming pool that 'eats' people. One thing they did get right was the fx work, which is primitive but full on back-of-the-VHS-box type prosthetics and obviously had a lot of time and effort spent on it, make-up effects being one of the areas that the new generation of horror fanboys used to distinguish themselves in the eighties. It's a shame 'The Basement' couldn't quite harness the imagination and energy evident during the second and fourth of its stories, for it is in these places that the film comes into its own as a gleeful parade of the grotesque. Ultimately, it's less a realised whole and more a series of fragments, images and ideas that sometimes work, more often don't. The same could be said of a lot of no budget genre filmmaking, however. 'The Basement' is worth checking out as a curiosity, and I guess as a testament to the enthusiasm of fans, and I feel that it's best summed up by the music that plays over the end credits – out of tune and out of time heavy metal, played badly for laughs maybe, maybe not. |