This week, The B-Movie Boys crack open Basket Case (1982), Frank Henenlotter’s gloriously sleazy tale of a man, his wicker basket, and the deformed telepathic twin brother living inside it. What starts as a grimy revenge story set in the worst hotel New York City has ever produced quickly mutates into something way stranger, funnier, and honestly kind of brilliant.

We dive deep into the movie’s legendary $35,000 budget, guerrilla filmmaking tactics, aggressively janky stop-motion effects, and the bizarre emotional core hiding underneath all the melting puppet chaos. Along the way, we discuss psychic basket etiquette, mutant sibling dependency, horny monster logic, Times Square exploitation cinema, and whether Belial is secretly one of the great tragic monsters in cult film history.

There are riffs about kung fu movies, New Hampshire landmarks, Tom Green, Nathan’s hot dogs, and the logistics of securing a wicker basket containing a murder creature with what appears to be the world’s least effective padlock. Somewhere inside all the chaos, the Schlockometer starts having an existential crisis over whether Basket Case is actually… a genuinely good movie.

Mention in this Episode:

• The Wizard of Oz (1939)
• Watchmen (2009)
• Pink Flamingos (1972)
• Judy Garland
• Lindsay Lohan
• Michael B. Jordan
• Tom Green
• John Waters
• Joe Bob Briggs
• Nathan’s Hot Dogs
• Longaberger
• YouPorn
• “Pinball Wizard” by The Who

Our Links:

• BMovieBoys.com
• Official Discord
• Patreon
• Facebook
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Incoming transmission. Incoming transmission. Let's boogie.

Welcome to The B-Movie Boys, where bad movies get the love they deserve and the respect that they don't.

I'm Dave Michaels.

I'm Bryan Betz.

I don't know why I say bad movies anymore.

We have a pretty good track record of saying, hey, I like this.

Yeah, but we also like bad movies. Sometimes that's okay because you're allowed to like. But are these bad movies? Because I don't think that they are at this point.

This is like a whole discovery we're going through.

Yeah. Our whole mission statement's wrong.

We've been living a lie. Maybe. I. I'm still not sure.

Or maybe we haven't been.

Yeah. Give it to him. Goddamn.

Oh, he absolutely deserves it. Again, there's things in this movie that don't make any sense. When they happened and now they didn't make sense then.

They still don't make sense today.

Bryan, have you ever seen Basket Case? God damn it.

I've never even heard of Basket Case before we went on this experiment.

And now that you've seen Basket Case, how has your life changed?

I don't know how I ever lived without it.

Do you like that that much?

I don't know. I don't know. Maybe not. I haven't rushed out to watch Basket Case two or three yet.

You better not. Not without me.

I'm saving that.

I loved it. I loved every second of this.

God damn, it was so much fun.

It really was. So much fun. But is it a good B movie? And also, what is a B movie at this point?

What even is a B movie?

Well, that's why we have our patented schlockometer with its scientific and completely arbitrary 10 categories, where we dive into the movie and decide, is this a good B movie? Is this a very B movie? What are we trying to figure out here?

It's definitely arbitrarily a scored B movie.

We will know a score with that score means can't exactly tell you.

Oh, boy, this is a crisis.

It is. We have one movie, 10 categories. The first category is the audacity. And to determine that, we need to tell you the tale of Basket Case.

A terrified doctor gets murdered in his home by a gigantic, unseen creature. Hand. Immediately letting you know this movie has exactly zero interest in subtlety.

No subtlety whatsoever.

Left it at the door.

There's no reason for Subtlety.

They didn't have enough money in the budget for subtlety. I feel like famously low budget, $35,000. Just keep that in mind for everything you're about to hear.

Dwayne Bradley arrives in New York City carrying a mysterious wicker basket into the sleaziest hotel this side of a tax audit. He's very subtly flashing enough cash to attract every creep in the building.

It's a lot of money.

It's allegedly the entire budget for this movie.

This was not a prop. This was just the money that they had to make the thing that they're making.

This is it. This is all they had. And they were like, put it on screen. Show what we're working with.

What a wild flex. And yeah, I kind of think it was a flex a little bit.

Because Frank Henenlotter is a fascinating man, and we're going to talk a lot about him as this goes on, because this really is just his fingerprints, big time.

Frank Henenlotter, famous horror filmmaker, but he would rather you refer to him as an exploitation filmmaker he actually said that exploitation films have an attitude more than anything, an attitude that you don't find with mainstream Hollywood productions. They're a little ruder, a little raunchier. They deal with material people don't usually touch on, whether it's sex or drugs or rock and roll.

I feel like he's making movies for the type of person who still thinks it's cool to, like, when they hear, like, a kid tell their mom, like, shut up. Like, yeah, that's right.

Oh, you got her, man.

That's right. That's right. You rage against that machine.

You tell that B word what?

What's up inside the wicker basket that Dwayne Bradley is carrying is belial.

It's Dwayne's deformed, formerly conjoined twin brother who communicates telepathically, eats hamburgers and hot dogs by the pound, and absolutely refuses to stay in the basket.

That's his whole thing. That's the title of the movie. You Gotta be in the Basket, man.

I want you to imagine Dorothy trotting along on the yellow brick road with her basket, and instead of having Toto in there, it is Dorothy's deformed, formerly conjoined twin brother.

It's like a lump of skin that kind of has Dorothy's face, like if you covered a basketball with a rubber mask of Dorothy and a bunch of Silly Putty.

So you're basically saying if you took a death mask of Judy Garland like an actual one. You're just like. That's the puppet. Be like, nailed it. Oh, creepy.

Whoa. Yeah. Except this one is Kevin Van Hentenryck or whatever his name is the.

Lead star of our movie, too. He's double dipping here.

H10 hen tener. Something like that.

Both brothers in this movie. Yeah. It's not that hard, guys. It's not that hard. Now we're just giving awards for it, apparently.

Come on, now. This guy's actually both parts. Long before Lindsay Lohan.

Long before Michael B. Jordan.

Holy. Way longer than before.

We're putting him on blast.

Yeah, we are.

You know what the B stands for, right?

Belial. You should see how hot the regular one is. That's the deformed Michael Jordan.

Oh, dear. Oh, dear.

I fear I've gone too far into this rabbit hole.

You're in the basket. At this point,.

Duane visits The very subtle Dr. Needleman. He gives the receptionist Sharon a fake name, and yet he still gets a date with her. Somehow, Sharon makes bad decisions.

Sharon makes bad decisions.

Duane gets to see the doctor and reveals massive scars along his side. The doctor instantly realizes Duane is connected to the horrifying surgery everyone from Glen Falls once forgotten.

I like how he has this realization, seeing this giant scar that absolutely no one else in the world would have.

No.

And he's just like, oh, this reminds me of something.

This seems real familiar.

I hope this movie has a flashback to remind us what it might be. But not now. But not right now.

I know this kid from somewhere.

Because instead, now we're going to cut to Dwayne bringing his basket buddy to go see a kung fu movie. And in the movie theater, Duane falls asleep for 10 seconds max, I'd say.

Yeah.

And a movie theater thief steals the basket, runs to the bathroom, busts the lock that's on the wicker basket.

Why even have that?

The thief is gonna very, very subtly find out due to his fucking around.

Yeah, the subtlety here is. It's heavy subtlety.

Bryan.

Yeah.

Why would you put a lock on anything wicker?

Not to keep people out, but to keep whatever's in it in.

It's not like Rorschach and Watchmen in the prison.

No.

Also, it's like we see Belial take a door off its hinges, and we're meant to believe that he's just being kept in a wicker basket with a lock on it, like a little padlock.

We see him break out of the basket with the lock on it.

Yeah, it's like one of the first.

Things that Happens you can't keep a Lyle on a basket.

You can take the boy out of the basket, but you can't take the basket out of the boy.

I love how the thief gets badly got in this bathroom. And Dwayne's just like, Belial, Come on, man, we talked about this.

You can't just be killing random guys because they saw you.

I also love that Dwayne had just finished telling Sharon the receptionist that he didn't have time to do all this stuff around New York City, like see the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building. But he does have time to go watch a kung fu movie.

But Sharon.

When he meets Sharon the receptionist, and when he tells her that he hasn't had time to do any of the tourist stuff, she starts very angrily listing every New York thing that you can do.

Hey, this is New York. You haven't done New York yet. Try New York.

I'm not interested in doing New York. Where are you from? Upstate. I wouldn't trust that. No, I get it now.

Nope.

Nope.

Sharon makes bad choices.

Sharon makes bad choices.

Belial escapes and brutally murders Dr. Needleman, kicking off the twins revenge campaign against the doctors who separated them.

And in the meantime, Dwayne's gonna start dating receptionist Sharon because Sharon makes bad choices.

Sharon makes bad choices.

But Belial is going to get insanely jealous whenever Dwayne shows interest in independence, sex, or literally any human connection outside of the basket.

Yeah, he's very jealous, very possessive of his big brother.

Why wouldn't he be? He, like, literally grew off of him.

Is he like a. Like a tumor situation or not a tumor? Did Dwayne, like, eat him in utero but not finish the job? What's going on here?

Would he grow out of the side between. Didn't finish the job. That's not how that would work.

I don't know. It's like a absorption thing, you know, like the opposite of my toe. Maybe it was. Is that right? Mitosis. I didn't do well in biology.

I have a feeling leaded gasoline led to this situation. There. We figured it all out.

Nailed it. That's why we gotta invest in renewable energy, folks. So we don't have murderous half children.

That you feel empathy for. Yeah, believe it or not, this.

Mountain of face has an arc in a face.

Have you seen the Rushmore of Mount? It's a mountain of face.

He kind of does look like a piece. Like a section clawed off of Mount Rushmore and then just shrunk and gross.

I think he kind of looks Closer to the New Hampshire man in the mountain at this point.

That's fair. Yeah.

Where they still, like, throw that thing on everything. And that thing has been gone for a while now.

At least 20 years.

Like, what happened to the face rocks? They fell.

Why is it still your whole thing? Because we're New Hampshire. We got lobster to the left of us and maple syrup to the right after me ma.

Yeah. Being New Hampshire and being boring, as.

We used to have a rock face. So that's a cool thing about us.

We have an arcade that people talk about once. A documentary, which is hilarious because I.

Lived there for 10 years and didn't know anything about the damn arcade.

Would it have changed if you had known about the damn arcade? If King come out and you're just like, all right, I could do that.

Change my whole trajectory.

Pinball wizard could have been you.

I would have had to go deaf, dumb and blind, though. Well, at least deaf and blind.

Also, when Dwayne goes out on a date, he gets Belial a television set,.

I guess to distract him because they have the psychic link.

But, like, is this Belial's way of, like, I'm going out on a date, but also kind of found a loophole in how to watch the game?

That's it. It's like being in two places at one time. Like the old sitcom trope.

I just feel bad for Belial here. TV gets put right outside of his wicker basket. And that's way too close.

So close.

Like, he's going to hurt his eyes.

They're going to stay like that. You know, the way that they are for most of the movie until they start glowing for some reason.

I just want you to think of, like, you're in Jabba's palace and Big Fortuna is standing there, but also he's melting.

Somehow the two of them are becoming one character.

And for some reason, Crumb from a Real Monsters is involved, but I'm not sure how.

He's definitely in the vicinity. Do we mention that after Dr. Needleman's found dead, that Sharon's like, I need to go hang out with this boy again. I'm real hot now.

The fake name boy. I need to go see him to go get rid of the guy that showed up in my lines?

The guy that randomly showed up the day my boss died and gave a fake name. I think I need to go hang out with him about this.

Things were going okay until this strange boy with the basket showed up. And now things are not okay at all. I need to go date him about this.

I wonder what he's up to.

I'm storing all this grief for my boss in my crotch and I need a release of grief.

Hold on, we'll get there.

Grief release.

While drunk in a bar, Dwayne unloads the family backstory to his friendly sex worker neighborhood. That he and Belial were born conjoined. Their father hated them, and doctors surgically separated them, even though Belial probably wouldn't survive.

Flashback subtly. It's very subtle.

Subtle. Super subtle flashback.

Young Duane is forced into a good old fashioned dining room. Twin unconjoining. Belial is thrown into a black bag and is literally thrown out with the trash.

Yep. Just hanging out by the trash can with his family. Have himself a party.

I love how the doctors throw Dwayne onto the dining room table at their house. Then they stab something into Belial, and Belial, the puppet, just passes out. It's like a dead weight puppet hanging.

From this boy, laying a limp attached to this child.

They remove this giant tumor of a brother, and then they just all willy nilly sew the boy back up and just put him back into his bed. And the boy just wakes up with some gauze on himself.

And then he walks out because he has a telepathic link to his tumor brother who's in a trash bag.

I feel like you glossed over a really important part, which was the sound that it made when they separated these two kids.

Oh, geez. $35,000 Budget choices were made.

You know the sound of surgically removing a giant tumor.

It was similar. Like a cartoon octopus getting unsealed from anything.

Yeah, that's accurate. And it went on for so long.

This was the longest flashback ever. They really showed us the whole surgery. It felt like I was watching Tom Green get his balls taken away again. Ball taken away.

It did feel like that.

I don't know why I said take it away. He had cancer. It's not. They're just like.

They took it from me.

Tom.

Tom, you wanted it gone. Trust us.

You don't want this, buddy. You don't want. Can I eat it? Top, Stop asking that. For the last time, only if I.

Could do it on camera.

You don't need to do this. You don't show everything, buddy.

Somebody appreciate me.

We do. Stop. You're good, man.

Do you love me yet?

We always have, Tom.

Not you, dad. What?

Oh, no, it's one of those.

Belial immediately gets revenge by luring their father into the basement and giving him a particularly bad case of being cut in Half by a. A bud saw.

Is that what you call it when like you and your bud get together like hey, bud saw buzzaw. And then you go saw someone in half?

Yeah, I think it's. It's like a group effort in a way. It is a bud saw. The real buzzsaw was the buds we made along the way.

Oh, don't do that. I don't know why I feel the need to say that. Like, you and your friends can go cut anything else.

Yeah, not the buzz saw doesn't necessarily need to be human. Maybe I didn't need to say that. Maybe this is the learning experience for all of us.

No, but don't you get this subtle symbolism that they cut the father in half like he did to them?

Get it?

It's very subtle.

So subtle in fact, that Belial's gonna continue his murder stream. He tracks down the final doctor from their separation ordeal and stabs her full of scalpels.

That's right. Her.

Her.

Women can be doctors.

Dave, I learned something new every day.

The representation in this movie is actually pretty incredible.

It's insane. I remember messaging you while watching this thing and even saying we have like three women on screen talking right now.

That doesn't happen in 80s cinema, period.

It's crazy. And what's also crazy is that because Belial killed this doctor with so many scalpels, he gets really horny.

He does.

He steals his friendly sex worker neighbor's underwear for reasons when that's not cutting it. Belial's gonna escalate his horniness by attacking Sharon in this psychic sex fueled meltdown. There's no easy way to put this.

Belial's gonna fuck a dead girl. He's going to do that and we're gonna watch.

Yeah. He either fucks a dead girl or he kills a girl by fucking her. Either way, not great.

I have a question. Both not great, admittedly.

Are you gonna ask me which I would prefer? Oh, God. Honestly, kill me, then do what you want.

You heard it here, folks. The new $50 a month tier on Patreon.

50.

That's it. We got the Bryan to some sort of sex pin cushion. It's going to be fantastic.

So you know Belial killing your girlfriend, that's going to make you finally realize that maybe your brother is a murderous monster.

Not all the murdering that he's done in this movie gone.

Belial, I mean, he's been pretty on board with some of it. In fact, he's the one who's been seeking out the doctor's addresses.

It's true. He's just bringing the basket there.

So, like, yeah, he was avenging his brother and his separation on specifically the doctors. And he got upset when Belial went off script. Well, now Belial's gone really off script.

Gone completely rogue.

So Dwayne finally turns on him, leading to a violent struggle at the hotel window. The twins fall out of the building together, tangled in mutual dependence and rage.

And the feeling that we all knew that this is always how it was going to end. Also, that's the end.

That's it.

That they are laying on the pavement and you presumably dead. But we happen to know that there's Basket Case two and three. So.

Da, da, da. The ones that got money.

Right.

Audacity.

It's high.

This movie's insane.

Frank Henenlotter got this idea for this movie just because he had this visual of a guy walking through New York City holding a wicker basket with a monster in it. And that was it.

Sometimes it's all you need.

He had nothing for months, though, after he came up with that idea. And then while sitting in the Nathan's hot dog stand in Times Square, boom.

It hit him what he needed to do with this movie and how to do it and how to write it, and used all this dialogue from all around him in Times Square. Started writing on the back of the napkins that he was using his hot dogs. A lot of that ended up in the movie.

I mean, inspiration come from anywhere, I guess, right?

Yeah. There's a nice nod in the movie with the hot dogs, I think.

I love this movie. And I have no problem saying I love this movie because it is not subtle at all.

No, no.

And yet it's incredibly subtle.

Yeah. There. There is, weirdly, a whole arc that you go through with each of these characters. More specifically with Belial.

There is nothing subtle about this movie on the surface.

Yeah. Just watching, you'd be like, okay, you. It's all right there on the screen. And it's very obvious.

This was one. When I sat with it, it wasn't even that long. Sitting with. I went like, okay. There's an absolute ton going on.

There's a lot going on under the hood.

It's pretty much ego versus id. That classic battle.

Yeah. That's what it boils down to.

But then it boils down even farther when you look at it as society norms and what is okay and who gets to say what's okay.

Right. And then, like, how far would you go for family? There's so many layers.

And they also treat like Belial. Getting taken away from his brother is like an almost abortion. Literally throwing him out with the trash.

Right.

There's so much that this movie is actually saying.

There's an insane amount of nuance when you actually back up and think about it.

I'm going with a 10. It's an easy 10. I'm debating going higher.

No, it is like the easiest 10.

This one blew my mind when I sat with it.

The more I've thought about it, the more I've been like, huh, Was that a good movie? Full stop.

I still think it is. Yeah.

I mean, I'm.

Except for the parts when it's not. We'll get there, don't you worry.

The controversial bits.

What, you never watched a puppet fuck a corpse before?

Can't say that. It's on my to do list.

You gotta upgrade that. You porn subscription then, buddy.

I guess so. I'm not getting all those super secret categories.

Apparently not. You're only getting all the weird stepmom stuff. You don't even know what's in there.

Just wait till you get to the wicker basket section.

Gross. I can't say gross. Someone might be into that. Like the Longaberger family. That might be their kink.

Don't yuck my yummy.

Can't do it. Never gonna kink. Shame.

Got a wicker kink and that's fine.

So specific.

10 For audacity. Next category is Heart.

The heart is through the roof. And it's because Frank Henenlotter again put up his life savings. Another director doing that. He had some help from a producer named Edgar Ivins.

You know Edgar Ivins? Found him how? Frank Henenlotter made a short film, a PSA that's called Slash of the Knife in the 70s.

And it's this satirical PSA that's meant to be used as, like, propaganda to warn men against the bizarre consequences of remaining uncircumcised. So now do you understand the man's humor? You get it now?

Do you get it? Slash of the Knife.

Slash the Knife only played one time in theaters.

Just once.

Just once. And it happened to be on a double bill with Pink Flamingos.

So this producer finds Frank Henenlotter because he was at the screening with Pink Flamingos. They get together, they start making cheap movies together, and here we are.

Here we are. Yeah, they dropped it from the double bill because apparently it was too offensive to be played With Pink Flamingos.

Just to give you an idea what's going on here. And also. No, it's not. No, it's not.

Yeah, I can't imagine it is.

I love that Frank Henenlotter was in that I'll do anything to get this movie made mentality. To the point that he did the stop motion animation on Belial himself when he actually had to.

The stop motion, not so much the puppet work, which he also did himself. Yeah, but the stop motion animation looks so bad.

It's so janky. But it's like my favorite part of the movie.

It's hysterical.

So he said the first, like, 10 frames, he would move the puppet a little bit, walk back to the camera, click, walk back, adjust, fix it, walk back, click. And he's like, at a certain point, I just started kicking the thing to move it.

This is taking too long.

This is taking too long. He said he took the film out, he threw it across the room, left it on the floor for two months just to remind him how much he sucked.

Oh, my God.

And then when he came back to, he's like, it's kind of funny.

I actually kind of like the way it turned out.

That kind of works. It's not terrible.

It's a little bit creepy because of how, like, jittery and dysfunctional it is. There's an extra level of uncanniness to it.

But I also love that while making this movie, they didn't have any permits at all. Nothing. This is all guerrilla. Every single frame that you see here, even the hotel that he lives in, it's just built at their friend's loft downtown.

That's it.

Paper mache walls and fabric hanging.

But it all works because he wanted this movie to look cheap.

It's crazy when you think about it, because, like, the acting performances are not amazing. The script is.

No, they're not. Even. They're. You say they're not amazing.

It's bad acting.

Thank you. You. You've made it seem like, oh, they're really flirting with a fine performance.

No, it's bad acting. It's. It's not a great script. The effects are. Are janky. The sets are cheap as hell, but together it all just works.

That's the beauty of it. When it all gets pulled together and it's your vision. He knew what he Wanted.

Yeah.

And he got what he wanted. He made an exploitation film and did.

It brilliantly and cheaply and somehow maintained continuity and just all around impressive.

I'm going 11. 11.

I'm going the big number. Yeah. I think if there's a category that deserves it, it's that one. The next one is technical incompetence.

This is a tricky one for. This one is tricky. There's a famous story. Day one, they put the wrong viewfinder on the camera.

So everything that they shot was just the chins and down. Oopsies. This cheap movie wasted an entire day of filming because someone put the wrong viewfinder on. Yeah.

And they could only work on the weekends because they all had to maintain their full time jobs during the week.

That being said, he does a really,.

Really good job for $35,000. This is like some of the most competent filmmaking. Like he knows how to do all this stuff. It's just budget that's holding him back.

And it's not either, right?

Yeah. To the amount that it is holding it back, which is not much.

I'm gonna go with a three. That even feels high. I'll leave it. That's a weird one.

It is a weird one.

Both the next category. Low budget ingenuity. This is what I was gonna say. Come on. This is at least a nine.

Yeah. I mean it's. It's crazy.

Just the idea of keeping your monster inside a wicker basket for most of the movie so you don't have to do anything with it is brilliant.

But then when you do let the monster out and it's jumping on people's faces, you could just have the actors holding the thing on their face going around and you're playing it up for exactly what we all know it is.

Exactly.

And the actors are playing it up for exactly what they know it is. It works so well.

They did a trick in this movie that I did when I was in, in college. They couldn't afford a camera dolly so they used a wheelchair instead.

It's a classic move.

It's a great move. I've done it.

Fuck it 10 again. Fuck it 10.

Fuck it 10. I mean, they ran out of money so fast when they were filming this and then just kept extending it so they could make more money.

So they could keep making more movie.

You literally see the money in this movie.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's wild. Absolutely wild.

It's a 10 held in one person's hand. And it only looks a little impressive. Like it's like, hey, that's more than you probably should have.

These bags in New York are gonna think that's a lot of money. Next category is genre exploitation.

I mean, it's exploitation movie through and.

Through, through and through. This is textbook exploitation.

Great ten, but it's sexual. They don't get much more than that. They absolutely nailed it.

Hen and Lauder is like the king of, of this exact thing. Basket monsters and exploitation.

Basket Monsters is a perfect way to describe Frank Henenlotter's just mentality. Just a basket monster.

He's just a basket monster of a man.

Seems lovely. I think. I don't want to actually look back on any history because that's when bad things happen.

I'd rather not know the bad stuff. But I do know that like after he finished his like film career, he became really ingrained in the releasing outfit of Something Weird Video.

So he was instrumental in rescuing low budget sexploitation films from being destroyed and then re releasing them under Something weird specialty label called Frank Henenlotter's Sexy Shockers.

Beautiful. Nailed it.

Yeah, just all sexploitation films that he rescued from being lost to time forever.

I love how you keep saying rescued like he's a hero here.

Oh, he is.

He just likes vintage smut. That's really all it is.

It really is.

That's not true. I have such an appreciation for anything rescuing films. That's why like Arrow Video doing this was so cool to say.

I love how Arrow is doing that with a lot of these more low budget movies.

But yeah, we don't want things like the curious Dr. Hump to get lost to time. That's hump with two P's by the way.

I'm thinking of like the curious case of Dr. Hump. Like he fucks backwards and you're like, I don't understand how it goes back up. I don't get it.

None of us do. That's.

Where did it come from? That's the weirder part.

I actually found a list of some of Frank Henenlotter's Sexy Shockers and they're all exactly what you would expect them to be.

Is there one that jumps out at you right away and you don't know why? You just have to read it aloud right now.

Erotic Diary of a Lumberjack.

Nailed it. Perfect.

I want to know more.

I'm a lumberjack and I'm okay.

Almost as good as guess what happened to Count Dracula.

I want to know now.

I really want to know.

Great marketing.

Our next category is the Holy Trinity. Blood Boobs, Booms. Unfortunately, one of those Categories was lacking.

No booms.

No booms.

Why would there be, though? In office.

There's really no reason. We don't have money to explode a car just because it barely got tapped.

We did get boobs.

We sure did.

Dinner plate nipples on that one girl. That was ridiculous. They were enormous.

If you say so. Sure.

Like Italian five courser like that. You could get it all on there if you needed to. Like full Thanksgiving on these nibbles. They're enormous.

The camera angle was not helping her. It was a POV shot from Belial's point of view.

Yeah, that's a good point. I love Belial, like, walking.

Love that. They were supposed to have, like a whole set piece of Belial going around New York City and they had no money, so they're like, fuck it.

We'll use the psychic link and have our main character run around naked.

No permits.

No permits. Running around naked in New York City.

The holy trinity. I'm going with a seven.

I think a seven is. Seven is great. There was a ton of blood.

Oh, so much blood. It was fantastic. This is so good. So good. So good.

Good. Next up, we have memorable characters.

Big, huge, huge. Belial. Never forgetting him.

No.

The hotel manager. Weirdly, never forgetting him.

No. He. He kind of looks like Stavros, the. The stand up comedian.

He does. He reminded me of, like, Bob Hoskins for some reason. Big Bob Hoskins. Vibes.

Bob Hoskins and Stavros. And the guy from Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Carl.

Carl, give it his sandals and his jeans.

Smash the three of them together and you've got the hotel manager who wears a belt and suspenders and safety pins. His fly shot.

They're all fighting against each other at a certain point. 8. Yeah, it's a biggie. It's a really biggie.

I cannot forget Belial if I tried.

No, never. Never, ever.

Next up, we have quotes.

I don't have any that I'm getting right away.

Yeah, there's nothing that sticks out to me after a first watch, but I feel like with repeated viewings, there might be some stuff that's not good. It's not great.

I'm gonna go one for.

Well, that's half the movie.

That's a good point. 5. That's ridiculous. Just sounds the ADR in this movie is nuts.

I like that. It's still. It's Kevin Van Hentenryck.

Nick sure is like. But I'm even saying, even on the streets, like, everyone walking around, it's all adr. Everything's adr. Everything The Foley's shining through.

It's a work of art.

Whenever there's a woman walking around, it's actually Frank Henenlotter in high heels. Is it really?

Yep. You can do what you got to do, I guess. Right?

You got to do what you got to do. So I guess it's a one for quotes. But that brings us to entertainment value.

11.

Are you not entertained?

This movie might be the most entertaining we've watched so far. And that says something.

That says a lot because we've watched some really fun stuff.

This was awesome. This was just a blast to sit down and watch and once again, reading it on the back end of what it took to make this movie.

How could you not love this thing?

Exactly. This is. This is a love letter. To what? I don't know, but it's definitely a love letter.

And I'm even sitting here thinking about, what is it a love letter to? Because. Cultability.

Cultability.

This movie is preserved.

The Museum of Modern Art selected this for preservation and got the original 16 millimeter film and restored this in 4K. And it's a permanent installation.

But it's for such an unbelievable reason. It's a time capsule. There's no permits. It's all guerrilla. What you see, that's not set dressing on the street.

New York.

Right.

History. This is a literal time capsule of the city during this time. That's authentic.

There was a guy that came out of a porn shop and yelled at them because he thought they were doing, like, an expose piece on him until he found out that they're just shooting a stupid little horror movie. Go ahead, use my. Use my porn shop in your background.

Even then. I mean, the amount of people were.

You walk up to a shop in the background where you're trying to just get, like, permission and, like, you might throw a few bucks just to kind of, like, leave us alone while we're shooting here or whatever, they freak out and you're like, what are you actually up to? This shouldn't react like that. You shouldn't. Shouldn't react.

No, I don't want to be on your. I don't want to be in your camera. Get out of here with that ET.

The government run.

Belial was a little.

ET Esque cult ability. This thing could play at midnight for forever. I'd go every single week if I had the Option.

If I knew it was playing this weekend, I would be there.

Again, an 11. Again. 11.

That's a lot of elevens.

This is a really big movie, man.

All right, 11 for cultability, and that gives us a total score.

Bryan, I want to introduce a bump.

A bump after three elevens.

I want to introduce a full bump.

Whoa.

Because there's a name coming up for the first time on this show on episode number 10, who played a major role in this movie.

Your energy is real, Amber, right now.

This movie played at the Cannes Film Festival. This movie.

This movie.

This one. The one where they. They stand up now and they clap forever and they time the claps.

And, yeah, that movie must be fucking brilliant because people stood up and hit their heads together for 24 minutes.

It's got half an hour, so it's got no such movie.

Yeah, Basket Case played there. Get the fuck over yourselves. This movie gets picked up by the distributors, Analysis Film Corp. That's how you know it's good stuff.

The Analysis Film Corp.

Analysis Film Court, where all the most entertaining films go.

They take the movie and they say, well, this is clearly a comedy. Let's cut all the gory bits.

I don't think I want to see that cut.

And no one did.

Why would you?

So the distributors realized that they need to get a name behind this to get it some momentum so that they didn't just feel like they wasted something. So they get Joe Bob Briggs to say, yeah, absolutely, we could do a drive in in Texas of Basket Case. I saw it at Con.

He finds out that they're going to show the cut version without all the gore, and he says, like hell you are. I'm not coming.

And Joe Bob Briggs held them hostage, saying, I'm not going to do a damn thing with your movie, and it's not going to play in Texas if you don't put out the uncut version that I saw.

Give me the whole thing. Yeah.

And they did. And they didn't even do it as a midnight showing. They did it as a 2am showing just to give it a little bit more.

Oh, wow. That's awesome.

Joe Bob Briggs saves Basket Case, and he's the reason why this movie lives on in Eternity now in its original form. So I would like to propose that we give the Joe Bob Briggs bump. He's going to come up again.

I can't believe it took us 10 episodes for him to really come up, but this one seemed the important one for him to come up.

So the jbb, the old jbbp. The Joe Bob Briggs bonus point.

Oh, you're giving it a bonus point.

Oh, what kind of bump were you looking for?

I was going to give it a proper JBB and use a scale that Joe Bob would use. Oh. Where he would give scores for the drive in totals.

So you would have the counts of like the dead bodies, number of female breasts, estimated, pints of blood spilled. So in basket case, 10 dead bodies, six breasts. It would be weird if it weren't an even number, admittedly. Right.

It would be weird. Total recall looking at you.

There's multiple face clones, gut ripping of body parts scattering. There's seven gallons of blood with splatter. His rating, it's Joe Bob's highest rating. Four stars.

Four stars.

And he also includes a tear in your beer moment for the specific movie because he remembers the Highway 183 drive in in Irving, Texas. And hosting the original uncensored world premiere of basket case at 2:00am Give this thing four extra points for the JBB.

It's a big number, but it's deserved.

All right, we'll add in an extra four bonus points for the Joe Bob Briggs bump. This movie kind of got a big boy number, which is not a surprise.

It should.

Rotten tomatoes to 78. Critical 55 audience.

That's reasonable all around.

Yeah, I think that's, that's probably a pretty accurate depiction. I would say that the audience score is probably higher now, especially if you look at Letterboxd to 3.2. So that's a.

A 64 if you do it on a 10 hundred point scale. Not a 10 hundred point scale, but a 100 point scale.

He's gonna keep saying numbers.

Yeah, that's great.

Great. I love it. Let's keep doing that.

Let's do that. Metacritic 77, IMDb 6.2. Look, I can go all day, but we here at the B Movie Boys on the schlockometer have given it a score of 86.

Tied for the high score.

Tied for the highest score.

Oh man, that's a big boy number. Completely deserved. This is a fantastic B movie, exploitation movie all around movie. This was awesome. I loved every bit of this.

Another 86 to join the pantheon of 86 movies that we've scored. Not eight.

I'm good with numbers, but nothing's broken that number yet. That's three movies that reached 86 and have not gotten over 86.

Yeah, and we have two 84s in there too. So that's the ceiling right now.

That's interesting. Or is it? I don't know. But it's something.

It's definitely something. Maybe the scale's broken. Maybe it's all because of technical incompetence.

Maybe. Who knows? Standby.

We can test out another movie in two weeks. Speaking of which, what are we talking about in two weeks?

Let me just plug in the numbers in our AI machine, see if we can get maybe a decade. Kind of really messed up around with too much lately and. Bryan, are you ready?

I'm ready.

The Lost Skeleton of Cadavera, An American.

Independent science fiction parody film directed by Larry Blamire. Blamire Blamer. So sorry if that's not how you say it.

One of those is close.

That's exciting.

This is gonna be a fun one. I cannot wait. In two weeks, the Lost Skeleton of Cadavra.

Until then, thank you for listening. Be sure to rate Review, Subscribe Share this podcast. Head on over to patreon.com/macguffinstudios (that's "Mac" like the burger, "Guffin" like a muffin) where we have all this exclusive content we're putting out every month for your listening pleasure. Or not pleasure, or whatever it is.

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Try it out. You might like it.

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Yeah, do what you do what you want. If you want, head on over to our Discord. There's a link in the show notes.

And that's where we also do our Monday Midnight Movie Madness, which is not at midnight, it's at 10pm Eastern. Because we have lives.

I like how Joe Bob Briggs is like, I'm not gonna do midnight. I'm gonna go 2am and we just went the complete other way.

Other way. We're like, no, 2am Now. You're getting into tomorrow territory. Give us.

I remember when movie theaters started shifting to, as long as it ends after midnight, it counts as a midnight release. And then eventually they're just like, fuck it, start it at 3pm on Thursday.

Who cares?

At this point, none of this is real. We need to maximize our box office numbers.

We're giving ourselves our own limitations by saying, come watch Harry Potter at midnight. That's not the demographic. Are we crazy?

And while it is the demographic for us, we still started at 10 because we respect your time.

It's true. And we're old now.

Yeah. Yeah we are. You can also follow us on social media, @bmovieboys on Facebook, Instagram and stuff.

Send us emails [email protected] if you got any requests, questions, comments, all that good stuff.

Bryan, you got anything else?

I'm proud of us for not making any Green Day references.

Fantastic or good riddance. I I'm not sure at this point. Thank you guys all so much for listening. You're all the absolute best.

Week after week, every other week, every other week, every month, every year. Thanks for hanging out with us. It really means the world to us that you guys take the time. We really appreciate it.

We're going to see you in two weeks time when we talk about The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. But until then just like Belial and his wicker basket about to go see the big city for the first time and he's going to... *unintelligible noises that barely coalesce into the words "Good Journey!"*