Moviegoer Diary: Basket Case, OSS 117: Cairo, Nest Of Spies

BASKET CASE

Plot In A Nutshell
Frank Henenlotter’s 1982 cult horror movie about a young man named Duane who comes to New York, carrying his hideously deformed Siamese twin brother Belial in a basket, plotting revenge on the doctors who separated them.

Thoughts
I had never heard of Frank Henenlotter prior to reading the insanely long interview with him in Re/Search: Incredibly Strange Films. It was several years later that I finally saw my first Henenlotter film, the delirious Frankenhooker, and then it was roughly another decade and a half before I delved into his oeuvre again with Basket Case.

This time, my interest was piqued by the recent all-Henenlotter episode of the Mondo Movie podcast, and especially by their account of how Henenlotter had retired from directing films for about 16 years, and only got back into it when rapper R.A. the Rugged Man entered the picture — apparently R.A. is such a Henenlotter fan that he’s single-handedly putting up the cash for the director’s next few projects, starting with a horror sex comedy promisingly titled Bad Biology.

Basket Case usually gets grouped with The Evil Dead and Re-Animator, two other low-budget early-’80s cult movies especially beloved by gore fans for their blend of horror and comedy, as well as their resourceful special effects. Basket Case is probably the least accomplished of the three from a directorial standpoint, but only up until a point: just when you’ve gotten used to smiling indulgently at the clunky performances and Henenlotter’s lovably primitive experiments with stop-motion animation, the film serves up an absolutely harrowing, surprisingly powerful flashback to the night the doctors force Duane and Belial onto the operating table — I’ve still got the sounds of Belial’s inhuman shrieks echoing in my ears.

The design of Belial is pretty brilliant too: he’s such an extreme freak — he’s little more than a lump of melted flesh with a head stuck to it — that when you realize that he’s not just a rapacious monster but a creature with genuine human emotions (however twisted), it’s genuinely upsetting to see how everybody screams in terror every time they see him.

Good for you, R.A. the Rugged Man: every quirky filmmaker should be so lucky as to have someone like you watching out for them. I wonder: is Henenlotter the Belial in their relationship — the strange creature who doesn’t get out of his basket very often, but who leaves a trail of bloody cinematic mayhem behind him whenever someone leaves the lid up?

RATING: 4/5

* * * * *

OSS 117: CAIRO, NEST OF SPIES

Plot In A Nutshell
Michel Hazanavicius’ 2006 spy spoof, based on a series of “straight” French espionage novels and films from the 1950s and ’60s, in which a culturally insensitive secret agent (Jean Dujardin) battles traitors, beds beautiful women, and angers Muslim extremists during a mission in 1955 Cairo.

Thoughts
The perfect antidote to the glum, heavy-hearted Quantum of Solace. Daniel Craig may give the most realistic, “grounded” performance anyone has ever given as James Bond, but as Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath, French comedian Jean Dujardin captures the Bond spirit in all its smug, preening ridiculousness.

With a handsomeness that shades subtly into caricature (his hair parted just a little too perfectly, his nose and ears just slightly too big for his face, his eyebrows constantly lifting and contracting with an expressive dexterity that even Stephen Colbert would envy), Dujardin creates a character of breathtaking, unthinking fatuousness. Indeed, part of the novelty of the film is seeing a Frenchman behave with an oafishness towards foreigners that you normally associated solely with Americans: in one scene, he looks out at the Suez Canal and marvels that something so ambitious could have been built 4,000 years ago; and in another, he beats up a muezzin for waking him up early with his call to prayer.

And yet there’s something utterly lovable about him — it helps that he keeps getting carried away whenever music starts playing. There’s a hilarious bit set at a swanky party. Dujardin has just finished dancing the mambo with a sultry femme fatale; the band strikes up a catchy “twist” tune, and even though his partner has left the floor, he can’t help himself — he starts doing this delightfully daffy, completely un-self-conscious dance move, swinging his arms and grinding his hips with an expression of utter joy on his face.



I wished the film had been more consistently funny (although I suspect there were a lot of cultural references that flew over my head), but there were several sequences that had me laughing out loud, especially Dujardin’s unintentionally homoerotic memories of a dead fellow spy, and an action scene in which Dujardin and a hooded killer fight by throwing live chickens at each other — a sequence, incidentally, that is more exciting and better choreographed than anything in Quantum of Solace. The production design, which apes the look of international thrillers of the ’60s, right down to the unconvincing day-for-night photography and the obvious use of rear-projection in all the driving scenes, is as immaculate as Dujardin’s pocket square.

RATING: 3/5