With A Cuddle And A Kiss: Basement Jack (2009)

Basement Jack (2009)

Rating: ***

Starring: Eric Peter-Kaiser, Sam Skoryna, Michele Morrow

A serial killer with a severe case of mommy issues, Jack Riley (Eric Peter-Kaiser), AKA 'Basement Jack' for his naughty little habit of hanging around in the basements of houses before slaughtering the families who own them, gets recently released after serving an eleven-year sentence and goes back to doing what he does best, leaving a nice trail of murdered households. All the while, Karen (Michele Morrow), the only survivor of Jack's last family hack 'n slash before he got locked up, is out tailing the madman in hopes of putting an end to his killing spree, doing her damnedest to warn everyone of the impending evil on two legs. (Yes, Dr. Loomis and Laurie Strode rolled into one!)

The two end up prowling each other in a macabre cat-and-mouse game at the town of Downer's Grove, where Karen teams up with rookie cop Chris (Sam Skoryna) to try disentangling Jack's next move and targets, all the while Jack does his usual modus operandi of murdering families and creepily posing their corpses. As Chris and Karen get continuously chewed out for interfering with proper police work, thus ignoring their input on the investigation, we're also dealt with peppered flashbacks and hallucinations detailing what exactly caused Jack Riley to get this much loose screws in his head; long story simple, his mama (Lynn Lowry) loves to psychotically torture little boy Jack with 9-volt batteries and leaving him out chained to a pole during thunderstorms, so big boy Jack is warped in the head with a bloodlust for happy families. Particularly those with mums resembling his own.

Basement Jack (2009), in all honesty, didn’t really do anything new for the subgenre and it more or less suffers from common direct-to-video slasher pitfalls of overused CG effects, mediocre acting and oozing levels of fondue. It does, fortunately, approach its story with an interesting angle of making the killer a tad more fleshed out than your average masked psycho, generously focusing on his psychosis and the patterns to his madness which result to Jack being portrayed closer to how serial killers operate. There are times the movie almost feels like a character study for how much and often these little snippets of the killer's abused childhood get shown, only to share its limelight with the police work being done to capture our elusive serial slayer which does reduce a lot of the kills into offscreen massacres, the victims merely existing to be slain.

The last act of Basement Jack (2009) is where the absolute craziness kicks in, with Jack going further into slasher villain mode, donning himself a broken porcelain doll's mouth as a mask piece and wielding something best described as a wearable sword. By that point, we get a cop station massacre inspired by The Terminator (1984), littered with hilariously awful CG and some impossible yet outrageously fun kills, before going down on a brawl between Karen and Jack atop a hotel that's punctuated with a shot calling back to Halloween (1978) and an ending that reminds me of Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988). It's the kind of silliness that only a B-grade slasher can pull off and I love the fact that the film embraces its own shlock the further it goes down, even if some of it didn't exactly work. 

Not quite high art, but doable as a fun little timewaster that's a little more better than most video bin horror flicks!  

Bodycount:

1 female found beheaded

1 male found dying from his wounds

1 male repeatedly stabbed through with a knife

1 male found with half of his face missing

1 baby implied murdered

1 boy seen murdered

1 female found slaughtered

1 male stabbed in the gut with a machete

1 female found murdered

1 male gets a machete to the face

1 male and 1 female seen slaughtered with a machete

1 male gets stabbed though the gut with a machete, skewered unto a fuse box and electrocuted

1 male stabbed through the head with a machete

1 female stabbed through the gut with a machete

1 female seen slaughtered (flashback)

2 males double-scalped with a wearable sword

1 male killed with a wearable sword

1 male had an arm lopped off with a wearable sword, killed

1 male skewered through the gut with a wearable sword

1 female gutted with a wearable sword

1 female seen murdered

1 male seen murdered

Total: 24