Budapest's Bloody Basement: The Basement (2017)

The Basement (US/United Kingdom/Hungary, 2017)

Rating: *1/2

Starring: Caroline Boulton, Marina Gera, Zsolt Páll

After their house party got shut down by a noise complaint, a small assortment of international students staying at an apartment in Budapest, Hungary got bored enough to do a séance. As they do, a door wasn't closed right so their house cat slips out into the night, which the group eventually notice after their little spooky séance session. When they step out to start looking for the furry fella, they hear the cat meowing from inside an abandoned city basement so they opted to continue looking down there, only to find that the place is seemingly haunted by a crazed figure resembling a woman wearing a broken mannequin's face who wastes no time hunting them down.

So, yeah, everything horrifying that happened in this movie started because someone's pet cat snuck out and wandered into the titular underground basement. Worst pet rescue ever!

I will give this movie points for the claustrophobic set-pieces, a few good peppering of gore here and there, impressive for a mini-production, but its direction and execution clumsily clunks through what little story The Basement (2017) has to offer, which is basically just five people going around concrete tunnels and hallways while a freak in a mask chases them down. Any sort of intrigue or conflict here is reduced to a few characters bickering whether the killer chasing them is an actual demon or an underground-dwelling nutcase, all done through an exaggeratedly uneven tone and dubious personality shifts from its casts. It can get annoying. Tiresome. Weird, even. We do get decent-ish reveal to the killer's true nature at the near end but, after enduring all that terrible acting and line-reading, not to mention the lackluster plotting, does it even matter?

The Basement (2017) is just forgettable. It does the most out of a small budget to make a little horror flick and I commend the attempt, but I'm not gonna pretend I have a swell time watching this worn-out wannabe spook-fest get further butchered by uninteresting victims-to-be. Skip it.

Bodycount:

1 male killed offscreen, blood spill seen

1 female dragged away, killed

1 male killed, blood splash seen

1 male found gutted, left for dead

1 female set ablaze

1 male had his throat sliced with a pickaxe

1 female brained dead with a brick

1 female gagged with a doll and strangled with a length of fairy lights

1 male hacked to death with a pickaxe

1 male doused in gasoline, set on fire

Total: 10