Customer Reviews

Basement Jack

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Once again I was taken in by an "award winning" (as stated on the cover as well as the dvd itself) horror movie. I can't imagine anyone who doesn't have a financial interest in this crap praising it. The movie tries (and fails miserably) to use a plot line similar to that of "Halloween". It uses most of its (low) budget on special effects which are okay but nothing you haven't seen before and not worth sitting through the whole movie for. The Basement Jack character is not very frightening, the acting sucks. In one scene the victim falls dead seconds BEFORE Jack sticks his blade into him. I had to go back and replay the scene in slow motion to make sure that I saw what I thought I did. The dialogue and storyline are more often than not, unbelievable and stupid. There's a scene where Jack kills off most of an entire (GUN CARRYING) police department in their own headquarters using nothing more than a machette. All in all, this useless excercise of a movie is an annoying, (unintentionally) laughable complete waste of time.

Don't waste yours on it.

The complete, utter, and absolute lack of intelligence or originality in this movie might have been something I could have overlooked had the producers given it even the remotest suspense or brio. They entirely failed at this though. Basement Jack features risible acting even by C-movie standards and is so ridiculous and even cartoonish in its portrayal of its events I couldn't even try to bring myself to suspend disbelief enough to appreciate its supremely amateurish antics. Aside from having Michele Morrow as eye candy and a semicapable actress, there's literally nothing redeemable about this worthless flick. I regret having wasted two hours of my life sitting through this cliche-ridden, utterly unsatisfactory dreck.

Basement Jack is an independent slasher movie in the vein of Rob Zombie's Halloween. Like that film, it shows in great detail what exactly made the serial killer tick. I, unlike some people, appreciated that approach in Zombie's movie, and I appreciated it here as well. It makes for a more believable and interesting movie when there is a know motive, because no one is born evil. Something has to happen to make someone who they are.

In Basement Jack, we are shown many flashbacks to Jack Riley's childhood that show that he had an abusive mother growing up. The mother is played by Lynn Lowry of George Romero's The Crazies. All grown up, Jack is a homicidal killer who preys on families after slumming in their basement. That's how he got his nickname.

There is a huge body count in 'Basement.' I didn't count, but I'm sure something like twenty people are knocked off. Unfortunately, about half of the death occur offscreen. That's pretty much the only problem I had with the film. As a whole, Basement Jack is the most interesting slasher I've seen in a while that takes itself seriously. And as a plus, one of my faves Tiffany Shepis shows up as a police officer.

<strong>Basement Jack</strong> (Michael Shelton, 2009)

I've seen a number of reviews of <em>Basement Jack</em> that would seem to be trying to shoehorn it into the retro-horror category with movies like <em>The House of the Devil</em> and <em>Insidious</em>. This tells me one of two things, and I can't be sure which it is: either these folks have no concept of what the directors in the retro-horror movement are trying to do, because <em>Basement Jack</em> never even attempts to take that route, or these folks are desperately trying to find something good to say about what is otherwise a bland, featureless slasher flick. (As I said, I don't know for sure, but I am somehow oddly convinced it's the former.)

Our title character (<em>Miracle</em>'s Eric Peter-Kaiser) is a crazy killer who gets sent up for killing the family of Karen Cook (played as an adult by <em>Bled</em>'s Michelle Morrow) during a raging storm. Fast-forward eleven years. Jack was released from the asylum (writer Brian Patrick O'Toole, most recently responsible for the abortion that was the new <em>Atlas Shrugged</em> script, seems to have missed the bit in every courtroom TV show that tells you that when you're declared mentally incompetent, the hospital is supposed to keep you until you're, you know, better) and, not coincidentally, there's been a string of murders wending its way across the country. Karen Cook, now an adult, is tracking Jack to take her revenge. The two collide in a small town just as the rainy season rolls in.

What these "this hearks back to the glory days of the eighties slasher film!" folks don't get about the new retro-horror movement is that it's not about the subject matter. Yes, they're obviously aping the subject matter, but that's just a function of trying to create a film with the look and feel of a seventies/early-eighties horror flick with a modern plotline, as <em>Insidious</em> did with <em>The Entity</em> or <em>The House of the Devil</em> did with any number of seventies Satanic-Panic movies. For a literary parallel, think about H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft is one of the most imitated authors of the twentieth century, but everyone who sucked the blood from Lovecraft's neck went for the crawly things, from August Derleth all the way down to Fred Chappell. They're all decent enough writers, and the stories are amusing, but they don't have that something that makes Lovecraft's work so appealing. Enter Thomas Ligotti, who chucked, for the most part, the creepy-crawlies and took the Lovecraft atmosphere. He showed the world exactly what all those other folks were missing. Back to <em>Basement Jack</em>, you've got Sam Raimi and Ti West and James Wan being the Thomas Ligottis of the film world; Michael Shelton, at least with this flick, is just another Steven Rasnic Tem or Brian Lumley, turning out journeyman work that's competent enough, but pretty darned hard to get excited about when you've got genre giants looking over your shoulder doing it so, so much better.

(As a side note, I didn't know before watching it this is the middle part of a very loose trilogy, the third part of which has not yet come out as I write this; if you value continuity in such things, you will want to watch <em>Evilution</em> first, though I don't think it's necessary to figure out what's going on here.) * 1/2

It is rare when i give a movie five stars because i am very picky in my movie selections but this movie is now at the top of my list of favorite horror movies. This movie is about a serial killer who grew up as the only child of an abusive mother obsessed with elecricity. Jack had spent his life being psychologically and physically tortured by his widowed mother causing him to go on a homicidal parade of huge proportions. But that was until he had been caught by one of his potential victims and sent to an insane asylum. The movie really kicks off when the same girl who put him in the institution is now hunting him in a town that he has moved to where he is starting another series of horrific murders with his machete and turning people into human mannequins.

I highly recommend this movie for fans of blood, gore and Fridy the 13th movie fans.

Basement Jack is an excellent horror film that reminds me of the great slasher films of the 80's. I was skeptical at first wondering if this movie will deliver what it promises with all the praise this film has been getting from critics and festivals, so I really needed to check this film out. And I'm so glad I did. It does deliver with gore, a top notch bloodbath scene in the police HQ, and Lynn Lowry as his screwed up mother. WOW! I really enjoyed the dark atmosphere of this film as well as the pacing, it was very steady and didn't lag like you can find in some slasher films and the dark atmosphere really helped keep an unsettling feel as Jack drifts from kill to kill. I truly see this as a birth of a new horror icon as long as they don't do any supernatural hijinks like the Friday The 13th franchise did. This film is proudly displayed in my horror collection, and Long Live Basement Jack!

OK BEEN WONDERING ABOUT THIS FOR SOME TIME...I TRIED IT I LIKED IT.REALLY A 3.5 BUT IT IS A DECENT FILM I AM KEEPING MINE IN MY COLLECTION.
YOU KNOW THE STORY IT IS ALL ABOUT HOW IT IS TOLD.