S.F Brownrigg (“Poor White Trash 2”) is pretty much a love or hate him director with a sadly small output of films to his credit, and “Basement” is perhaps his most famous and is actually a pretty entertaining watch, despite some dubious plotting.
Quite frankly this Asylum is the worst mental clinic in the known universe! No security, open doors everywhere, knives left lying out and loony tune patients running around with total freedom. It also shows up how low the low budget is, the Asylum is simply a bland looking mansion house without any actual medical trappings anywhere in sight.
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Performances range from the enjoyably hammy to the genuinely effective. Especially good are Chandler as the love starved nympho Allyson, who moves from fawning joy to screaming rage in the blink of an eye according to how people react to her advances, Weenick as the strict Dr Masters and Gene Ross (“Lost Highway”) as the brilliantly bonkers Judge. And given the lack of action in the script there is a lot of weight on the shoulders of the actors, so it’s to their credit that they manage to keep the movie interesting and give the characters so much life.
Despite it’s place on the infamous ‘Video Nasties’ in the UK there is actually very little in “Don’t Look in the Basement” that pushes any kind of violence or bloodshed boundaries…The only real exception to this is the deranged, screaming insanity filled finale (after the film’s twist is revealed) which delivers a lot of the red stuff in suitably violent fashion. It’s one hell of an ending and packs the horror punch that the rest of the film lacks.
So to sum up we have a solid little film that relies on its wonderfully fun characters to carry it until the pounding denouement. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but it’s well worth a watch and is better than some of the movies on the ‘Nasties’ list.
