Don't Look In The Basement! (1973)

Don't Look In The Basement!
Starring: Rosie Holotik, William Bill McGhee, Anne MacAdams
Director: S.F. Brownrigg
Writer: Tim Pope
Genre: Horror
Year: 1973
My rating: 

DON'T LOOK IN THE BASEMENT! (including explanation point in the title) is also known as DON'T GO IN THE BASEMENT (without explanation point), or THE FORGOTTEN, or DEATH WARD #13. Whatever it's called, it is one of the strangest movies I've seen in a long time.

The 1970s no-budget horror film seems to be a genre unto itself. Other eras have attempted to counter their lack of funds by introducing certain elements that -- while cheap to produce -- give the film something to offer. In the 70s, they just seemed to throw as much weird stuff as possible at the audience in hopes that some of it would stick.

As an illustration, let me describe for you the film's pre-credits sequence. At a secluded sanatorium for the mentally handicapped, the doctor in charge of the home is extolling the virtues of allowing one of his aggressive patients work out his negative emotions by shouting at him when he chops wood. Moments later, while turning to explain his theories to a bystander, he promptly takes an axe to the back of the neck with predictably bloody results.

A few moments later, a paranoid woman is guarding a child's doll, which she believes is her actual biological infant. The violent outburst she suffers when she thinks her baby has been taken concludes with the strangulation of a nurse. 

I would find it difficult to spoil the plot, because until the last half hour the film really doesn't have much of one. The story is told from the point of view of a Nurse Charlotte Beale (Rosie Holotik, a fetching redhead who modeled for Playboy the previous year). Charlotte arrives during the opening credits and finds herself working in a mental ward full of crazy people (not surprisingly). She is introduced to the stereotypical group of movie mental patients, which include the army sergeant -- traumatized by the deaths of soldiers under his command -- who thinks he is still at war, a nymphomaniac, a middle-aged man convinced he's a judge on the court of appeals, an enormous black man who's had a lobotomy (the movie's gentle giant who loves popsicles and innocently blundering into the film's more disturbing sequences), and an elderly woman who warns of impending danger before apparently cutting out her own tongue. 

As I indicated, most of the film doesn't revolve around a straightforward story. It's more a collection of individual strange scenes, most of which are seemingly unrelated to each other. The movie seemed so disjointed that at times I wondered if this was a deliberate artistic decision. I watched, theorizing if perhaps each scene was being told from the point-of-view of a different mental patient. I came to no definite conclusions, but I state at times it can be difficult to tell whether a director is going for something artsy and meaningful, or if he has simply just lost his mind.

The asylum itself also goes beyond the usual conventions of the closed-door set. While there are rare intrusions from the outside world into the movie, for the most part the characters are emotionally and mentally isolated from the rest of the world – but not physically. In other movies (say, for example, THE HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL), the characters may wish to leave their creepy location, but are prevented from doing do via a plot convenience. Here, leaving the house just doesn't seem to occur to anyone for most of the movie, even if doing so would behoove them greatly. It either adds to the dream-like feeling the film possesses (if you're feeling charitable) or is another oversight by the writer (if you're not).

I'm giving this film a slightly positive rating based solely on the fact that it didn't bore me. It puzzled me, confused me and disgusted me, but I can't say I was bored. Even the middle section which does drag on and on kept from being boring by becoming progressively more insane as time passed.

On the other hand, trying to take this seriously is an uphill endeavor (made more arduous by the fact that the film seems to take itself extremely seriously). Trying to find any logic to most of this stuff is next to impossible. To be fair, there is an extremely neat plot twist near the end. Part of my surprise was no doubt based on the fact that I hadn't even expected anything approaching cause-and-effect. But even starting with extremely low expectations, you can see moments where someone obvious put some thought into this.

The production itself looks very low-budget. I wouldn't be surprised if it was filmed in one of the production crew's parents' house over a three-day weekend. It's a very sparse set which gives the film a visually bleak flavor. It's a disturbingly claustrophobic feeling; the exact opposite of those 1950s horror movies that took place inside massive, spacious mansions with foreboding shadows. Here you can immediately imagine trying to squeeze past one of the house's inmates in a narrow, too brightly-lit hallway while they make their way towards one of the bare, tiny rooms. It's depressing to watch even before you take into account the murders, the madness and the mayhem.

It's hard to tell if the picture and sound of Digiview Productions release are a decent reproduction. The image is often overly whitewashed, but that may have been what the original production crew intended. 

However, there is some censoring present which will no doubt offend the purists. While a Digiview disc of a different movie that I watched simply pixelled out the nudity leaving the scene more or less intact, here they seem to have taken out the scissors and clumsily removed any frame containing the nude form (and possibly any frames which happened to be nearby). This renders one scene completely incomprehensible. We go straight from the beginning of a sex scene, jump to some random images of people's faces and end in one of the participants leaping up and down on a bed, laughing hysterically and flinging laundry out of a door. In any other movie this would appear odd; here, it seems about par for the course.

Presumably, the producers felt they could play fast and loose with logic, based on the idea that a movie about crazy people doesn't have to make any sense. It sort of works. While I can't see myself ever wanting to watch it again, I did enjoy the mental explosions that went off in my head as I tried to make some kind of sense of the images presented before me. This is not for the faint of stomach, or for anyone prone to headaches. But if the cinematic equivalent of a mental breakdown combined with 1970s horror gore is something that sounds appealing to you, then you should give this one a look.