Frank Henenlotter's Basket Case contains one of the few scenes in all of cinema that has truly made me feel sick to my stomach. It is the scene where Duane Bradley, a young boy, is held down by a group of surgeons who forcibly remove a monstrous conjoined twin attached to his side. It's remarkable how effective this scene is, especially considering how little of the operation we actually see. All of the horror caused by this scene comes from the nauseating sound effects, the crunching and squelching of surgeons pulling apart the bone, tissue, and sinew connecting the two twins. If the entire film had been this effective and masterful, I would have considered it a classic. But the rest of the film is just another revenge flick as Duane hunts down the three surgeons who operated on him and sets his deformed brother (whom he keeps in a large wicker basket) on them so he can murder them. The central problem of the film is that we never feel any sympathy for the two brothers. The deformed twin, appropriately named Belial, is such a spoiled brat and terrible person that we can't support him. Belial telepathically tortures Duane, destroys all of his property in a rampage, and rapes his girlfriend. But I guess that's what you get for naming your conjoined twin after one of the 4 crown princes of Hell. If they had made Belial a sympathetic character like Duane, then maybe we could have cheered him on despite his grotesqueness. But quite frankly, by the end of the film, we feel that they both deserve their ultimate fate.
6/10
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