Basket Case (1982): B

Set in seedy, pre-Disneyfication early-‘80s Manhattan, Frank Henenlotter’s Basket Case is the kind of film a young Martin Scorsese or Abel Ferrara might have made had they been interested in tales about murderous one-foot-tall monsters with a thing for hookers’ panties. Fresh-faced Duane Bradley (Kevin Van Hentenryck) moves from upstate New York to a squalid Times Square hotel with a wicker basket under his arm, prompting just about everyone he meets to ask – in the film’s recurring gag – “What’s in the basket?” The answer is Duane’s Siamese twin brother Belial, a freakish head with arms (made out of obviously cheap rubber) whose anger over being separated from his sibling’s side has driven him and Duane (who share a psychic bond) to seek out and kill the three doctors who performed the surgery. Looking every bit as ragged as its urban locale, Henenlotter’s midnight movie classic is nonetheless a thing of modest B-movie beauty, with its ridiculous effects, excessive gore, and uniformly wooden (and often intentionally campy) performances contributing to its ramshackle appeal. Once Duane falls for a receptionist (Terri Susan Smith), an amusing romantic competition arises between the once-conjoined bros. The pint-sized creature's jealousy and psycho-sexual confusion, however, are ultimately no more ridiculous – nor more endearingly cheesy – than a flashback to the duo’s childhood in which their loving, loyal aunt reads the kids a bedtime story with a cuddling Belial on her lap.