The words 'cult classic' tend to get thrown around a lot, but the movie Basket Case and its sequels are probably well deserving of that status. The first movie from popular horror and exploitation director Frank Henenlotter – who in time would also bring us the delights of Brain Damage, Frankenhooker and the bonkers Bad Biology – was a hit on home video on its release and has maintained an audience even thirty years after the final film. But is it worth all the fuss? Well, starting today and spanning the next couple of weeks, we're going to look at all three of these films to find out.

Basket Case is the story of Duane Bradley, a shy young man who arrives at a sleazy hotel with a basket in tow – the refrain 'what's in the basket?' is a cute running gag that occurs many times throughout, sometimes paying off and sometimes deliberately not. Said receptacle contains his 'brother' Belial, a hideously twisted, violent creature who was born attached to Duane's side and later separated against his will. All this we discover in a flashback later on, with the main thread of the story being Duane trying to get revenge on the doctors who traumatically pulled the two of them apart. We see some moments of Duane trying to have some sort of ordinary life – even with a murderous, telepathic sibling in tow – drinking with some of the residents of the hotel and even finding a blossoming romance with doctor's receptionist Sharon. This is probably what makes Belial most unhappy of all, and the fear of his brother leaving him forces him to extreme measures...

Like all of Henenlotter's movies, there's nothing high art here, and very little to truly tax the grey matter. But – to repeat the refrain, like all of Henenlotter's movies – this one is mightily entertaining. The movie slides along at a good pace, and has plenty of imaginative kills throughout. Kevin Van Hentenryck is wonderfully cast in the lead role as the naïve, wide-eyed Duane Bradley, dragged along by Belial's malice while seeking something else entirely. He certainly adds to this role in the sequels too, and here I feel like I have to give some extra credit just for that hairdo. The relationship between Belial and Duane is generally pretty well-conveyed – even if there's not necessarily the acting chops to really deliver anything Oscar-worthy – and while the effects on the whole aren't that great, if you can switch off that part of your brain and just enjoy it for what it is then this is plenty of fun. On top of that, the cast of the hotel around Duane contains some quirky, oddball characters, and for all there's nothing all that meaty here the 91 minutes of this movie will just fly by.

Strangely enough, it'd be a long, long time before we got a sequel – which is a little surprising, but it's entirely possible that the legend of Basket Case grew with time rather than it being an immediate smash hit. Next time around we'll be delving into the delights of Basket Case 2, which is I movie I certainly do have some vivid memories of... I wonder how it will still hold up today...

RATING: 8/10. Sure, I've praised it a lot, and it's a fine example of the 80s creature feature that was so prevalent at the time. It's not always a subgenre that I love to bits, and honestly not all of them look that good when you check them out in retrospect. However Basket Case held my attention all the way through, and while it may not make you laugh out loud it'll certainly get plenty of wry smiles. For everything there is to like here, I can't go too nuts because the effects did look hokey at times, the acting wasn't always what it might have been and it looks very cheaply shot – I'm sure it was, but sometimes movies are able to hide that fact (although not here). With all that said, if you like your horror bloody, outrageous and even a bit sill, then Basket Case might just be worth checking out.

Just think very carefully before you decide to look in that basket...

Ah, Japan. Probably the country that we’ve most visited within the five or more years of Film Gutter – there’s just something about films from that neck of the woods that can go very, very out there. And it’s back again for a film I’ve wanted to see for a long time in Naked Blood, another one of those 90’s splatter offerings that proliferated in the country at the time on the back of the infamous Guinea Pig movies and many more. It makes sense in a way – there was certainly a strong market at the time, looking for plenty of the crimson stuff, and these movies were not expensive to make. In fact I’d imagine most of the time, money and effort goes into the effects side of things in some of these cases.

Anyway, let’s zoom in on today’s particular offering, shall we? The story in Naked Blood follows Eiji, a talented young amateur scientist with a mother working in contraceptives. His father, who died a long time ago, was also a high-level scientist, so genius obviously runs in the family. And Eiji uses his smarts to develop a new sort of painkiller than floods the brain with endorphins whenever it feels pain – which he strangely dubs ‘my son’ – and he’s so determined to test it, he slips some secretly into three injections his mother is about to give. Eiji is dead set on capturing the results on his video camera, so he follows the three woman who have had his concoction around, striking up a particular relationship with Rika – a young woman who doesn’t sleep do to a medical condition. Sadly things are about to go deeply south, as the painkiller has rather unexpected side-effects, with those dosed up about to discover that pain and pleasure are effectively the same thing…

I can’t even remember where I first read about this one, but the concept of it always lodged in my brain, and the final delivery of it is pretty damn good for me. I can’t claim this one really rocked my world, but there were a lot more interesting concepts than I expected to go alongside some of the more stomach-churning moments. And it certainly delivers on that latter front – there were a good few scenes here that left me feeling a little bit woozy. The relationship that develops between Eiji and Rika was the bit that really caught me out – it was really intriguing and dark, and strangely enough had a cactus at the very heart of it. And only in Japanese cinema could I write that sentence…

Overall, I’d have to say it’s one of the better splatter movies I’ve seen. It has a lot more ideas behind it than many, and if anything the plot feels a little crammed in rather than having the same thin quality of numerous films of the stripe, which all too often pad runtime with excessive gore. While it has its flaws – the acting isn’t always all that, there’s numerous bits of the science that feel pretty half-baked and it is also a bit slow to get rolling. However this one had a bit of heart, and certainly went outside of the realms I would normally have expected, including some fabulously weird dream sequences. I’d say this is a movie worth your time – that’s especially true if you like splatter, but if you’re a fan of the more bizarre elements of Japanese cinema you could likely have some fun with this one too.

RATING: 7.5/10. Splatter has always been something of a mixed bag, but this one had some originality to bring to the mix. While it did deliver on the gore, it was a bit more sporadic and carefully-deployed and certainly not what the whole story depended upon. I preferred it to many movies in the subgenre, and it did enough to keep me on my toes and leave me guessing as to where it would finish off. This one scores a highly creditable 7.5/10 from me.

That sounds like a fun title, right? And honestly before I hit play that was absolutely all I knew about it – the description seemed to pitch is as a horror/black comedy, so sounded like it could be entertaining territory at least. In my experience it’s sometimes the case that these ‘sight unseen’ movies that produce the best results, so how would Violence Gives Him Hope stack up?

VGHH is presented as a sort of mock-arthouse piece, broken up into acts and chapters, with many of said chapters being incredibly short (literally a few minutes in some cases). It’s also shot in black and white – for the most part anyway – which adds to that sense of it poking fun at certain other movies that take on this style. The beginning of the movie follows Herman, a serial killer who is converted by a visiting Jehovah’s Witness to that cause – but sadly the stress and frustration of constantly having the door slammed in his face drives him back to his mass-murdering ways. This then loosely connects to the story of ‘Bone Man’, who is our main character for the majority of the movie. He’s an aspiring talk show host, particularly notable for the skeleton mask that he wears at all times. But things start to go pear-shaped for the Bone Man when he finds a dead body in the trunk of his car, as well as when he invites ‘Time Travel Bill’ onto his show. After that, he decides to get out of the cable access game and decides to work for the mafia and in particular his good friend Handsome Riggs…

Sounds odd? Well it is rather, and it’s hard for me to describe it in a way that isn’t. And I had to leave some stuff out above too. The movie beyond the point I described above sort of descends into a big old shoot out, which to me was less enjoyable than what came before it. In doing a bit more research into VGHH, I found out that movie was basically unscripted and filmed over a number of years – and it wasn’t a big surprise either. There were scenes and moments here that I really liked, but this film is really chaotic and the plot is prone to going off in very unexpected directions. It also seems to veer in style a lot too – the early running of the story is very heavily narrated (which I didn’t mind at all) before moving away from that for an awful lot, or trading the third person narrator for first person style. Sometimes the visual choices were a bit jarring, although of course I do fully appreciate some of those might have been due to the very low budget of the movie – around $2500 apparently. It’s extremely commendable to make a film for that sort of money, let alone something virtually feature length, so while I do tip my hat I can’t say I loved all of this one.

My overall suspicion is that you could have been improved by a few judicious cuts here and there, and maybe toning things down in places. But there were some laughs throughout, and some really interesting concepts to boot, so it certainly did what it said on the tin for me. It’s not an unmissable offering, but it remains worth checking out if you have the time and you like truly weird and wonderful dark comedy.

RATING: 6.5/10. It’s no secret that I love originality and creativity, and I also love ambition in low-budget film-making. Violence Gives Him Hope has plenty of all of those things, and though it doesn’t always hit its marks there was enough here to keep me watching and to leave me going away feeling as though I’d had a good time. It’s a surreal cast of characters embarking on a story that doesn’t always entirely hang together, all shot like an arthouse movie but with a tone and pace that sometimes flies in the face of that tradition. You can watch the movie for free on YouTube via Skyburner Films themselves at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TPjkFP-YX0, and if you like it you can get a hold of the movie on DVD to support them.

Dir. Daisuke Yamanouchi, 68 mins

Japan has always had a healthy helping of splatter cinema to offer up, often tracked back to the infamous Guinea Pig films of the late 80s. But that tradition has continued on since, and Red Room is probably one of the most notorious of the movies to follow on in that wake. I have seen and reviewed the sequel here, so I did have some sort of idea of what I was letting myself in for – though the two films are a little different to one another. Anyway, let’s look at this one in isolation, then we can come to comparisons later.

Red Room is effectively presented as a sort of extreme gameshow, with four participants all having the chance to win 10 million yen (about 75,000 pounds so I gather) if they are the last person standing at the end of The King Game. The game itself is simple – there are four cards, three with a number on and one with a crown on. The person who gets the king card is able to order the other players to do whatever they like. This is all in an effort to get the other players to give up or get ‘eliminated’ from the game in some other way….

The cast of four are an interesting bunch – a husband and wife both struggling under the same crippling debt, a young woman whose motivation is never totally clear and a schoolgirl whose need for the money does become clear – but I’m not going to spoil that. Part of the interest in the movie is the whole business of guessing who the winner will be – my impression on this changed a few times throughout, and I still didn’t get it right in the end. There are also some interesting reveals throughout, and I found the dynamic between the married couple particular fascinating – the environment here allowed plenty of old resentments to come out.

Like its sequel, I came to the end of Red Room not quite sure what to make of it. There are times that the tone and style feel almost comedic, deliberately overblown, then at other moments it turns absolutely brutal and becomes incredibly hard to watch. And make no mistake – some of this will prove upsetting for many. But by the time you throw in an ending that seems to barely chime with either of those things, it’s a little confused – although in a way I didn’t mind. In fact a straight torture/gore movie would probably have been easier to deliver – there are plenty of those out there, after all. But to actually make me invest in characters and come away with a sense that I liked it, despite all its horrific content, is something else entirely.

So how does it compare to part 2? I feel like this one benefits from a shorter run time – the sequel felt a bit long even at 81 minutes, and this is much more taut and pacy. Things escalate more quickly and move from relatively innocent horseplay to full-on violence and depravity in less time. There remain surprises aplenty in both, although the finale of Red Room 2 is probably even more confounding than this one. However I felt that the shortcomings in this one felt less pronounced – the acting is overblown, but less so, and the use of the multiple cameras in this one felt better deployed.

Is it easy to watch? Good lord no. But I don’t think either of these movies are quite as grim as they’re made out to be – sure, it’ll prove too much for plenty of viewers, but I’ve seen plenty worse for utter twistedness and there is something more to both movies. In the case of Red Room, the bizarrely optimistic ending leaves a very different feeling to what I would have guessed. If you can handle the content, I’d argue this one is well worth your time.

RATING: 8.5/10. A truly odd movie, Red Room combines black comedy, deeply disturbing visuals and slow-burn character development to achieve something I don’t think I’ve quite seen done before. It does take its cues in a way from the latter parts of the Guinea Pig series, which often also threw seemingly incongruous elements together. Red Room will probably be too much for many, but the fact the tone isn’t entirely malicious does alleviate some of its darkest content for me.

Dir. Pollyanna McIntosh,
​100 mins

When I think of absolute favourite extreme horror films, Lucky McKee’s The Woman has to be right up there. As well as its brutal depiction of the feral lead character, it’s a cutting jab at the ‘All-American Family’ and just a mesmerising film to watch with an absolutely explosive finale. It’s always been in my mind this one would be hard to follow up on, but even with that said I was super excited when I heard there was a sequel in the works – directed by none other than Pollyanna McIntosh, star of The Woman. If anyone would get the character and the milieu of that film, it had to be her.
And I was just as excited to see this one spring up to watch on Sky Cinema recently.

In coming to this one, I had to remind myself to try not to hold it to the lofty standard of its predecessor. In fact this one effectively polishes off a trilogy that started with 2009’s Offspring – which was a good (if mighty hard to watch) film in its own right, but still not up to the par of The Woman.

(Note to self – I must rewatch and review Offspring).

So basically I’m doing my best to look at Darlin’ as a movie in its own right and not constantly draw comparisons to one of my top 5 extreme horror movies. With that said, on we go…

Darlin’ is the story of a young girl from the feral cult that the first two movies followed, who strays into the city and finds herself being hit by an ambulance just outside the hospital. Of course she then finds herself taken inside, and strikes up an uneasy alliance with Tony, a nurse who is the only person to manage to soothe her and get through to her. Of course the hospital can’t keep her long term, so Darlin’ finds herself taken in by a Catholic care home where she is looked after by an unflailingly confident Bishop and rather shyer sister Jennifer, who takes it upon herself to teach their new occupant to speak and show her the ways of the faith. Meanwhile The Woman herself is out on the streets looking for Darlin’, leaving a swathe of chaos in her wake.

There’s a lot to like about Darlin’ – the acting performances are generally strong, especially Lauryn Canny in the lead role, who not only depicts the savagery of the character’s early days but that gradual, uneasy journey towards becoming a part of mainstream society. On top of that. Pollyanna McIntosh effortlessly slips back into her role as The Woman. Some of the cast around are a little stereotypical as characters, although there’s no-one that stands out as particularly being a weak link in their delivery.

The story itself is enough to keep you interested, but for me it rather went in the direction I had expected and didn’t pack many surprises throughout. For me that was maybe my main complaint – I’m not usually the best for anticipating plot points, but I was largely able to do so here. Everything was solid, and well done, but it didn’t quite have the raw and uncomfortable quality of The Woman or the unexpected moments of its predecessor (I know I saw I wouldn’t compare, but just let me off one, OK?)

With that said, it certainly feels like a good way to wrap up the trilogy and a logical place to conclude things. I’m going to make a point of one day sitting down and watching all three back to back, to see exactly how they hang together, but despite the long break between the two concluding parts it almost feels necessary to draw things to a close here. I’d be hard pressed to see anything else coming after this, but this one is certainly worth the time if you’ve enjoyed the first two. While I’d argue having seen Offspring and The Woman is not an absolute essential, you’ll probably get more out of it with the past knowledge.

RATING: 7/10. Darlin’ was good, with particular highlights in some of the key acting performances, and the plot was engaging even if some of the events were pretty easy to see coming. It was maybe a neater, tidier and cleaner film than either of the other two parts of the trilogy, but even with that difference it’s a worthwhile watch in its own right. It certainly feels like the end of the road for these characters and the core concepts that have carried them, and when it came to a conclusion I certainly felt satisfied on the whole – despite a slightly odd post-credits dance scene… so overall it’s a 7/10 for this one.