Basket Case

• Shot for roughly $35,000 on a 16mm CP-16 camera, then blown up to 35mm for its April 1982 theatrical run. Henenlotter seeded the production with his own $8,000 in life savings, which producer Edgar Ievins matched; the whole thing crawled together over about six years, with the actual principal photography squeezed into long weekends throughout 1981 because nearly everyone on the crew had day jobs.
• Filmed in the pre-cleanup Times Square and 42nd Street that Henenlotter grew up haunting as a grindhouse regular. The grimy 'Hotel Broslin' was faked inside an office building at 80 Franklin Street in Tribeca, where a service elevator got dressed up as the front desk.
• Belial was designed, sculpted and fabricated by Kevin Haney, modeled from a cast of star Kevin Van Hentenryck's own face; John Caglione Jr. handled the younger/baby version of the creature. The monster is a mix of puppet, prosthetics and stop-motion (the floor-crawling rampage shots are stop-motion done by Henenlotter himself). Both effects men went on to win Best Makeup Oscars within a decade, Haney for Driving Miss Daisy and Caglione for Dick Tracy.
• Whenever Belial's clawed hand reaches out to maul a victim, it is literally a latex glove on Henenlotter's own arm shoved into frame.
• Kevin Van Hentenryck, who plays Duane, also supplied the gurgling voice effects for Belial and gave the face cast the puppet was sculpted from.
• The infamous 'This is the sickest movie ever made!' tagline really did come from critic Rex Reed, but not from any printed review. Henenlotter ambushed Reed outside a screening for an off-the-cuff reaction, then plastered the quote on the ads; Reed was annoyed at first but eventually signed off. In 2017 the Museum of Modern Art selected the film for preservation and restored it in 4K from the original 16mm camera negative, turning a film once dismissed as trash into part of MoMA's collection.

Belial isn't a separate monster so much as Duane's amputated rage made flesh. The boys share a telepathic link, and Belial only ever acts on the resentment Duane can't voice, going berserk the moment Duane gets close to Sharon. Read that way, the basket is just the lid Duane keeps on his own appetite for revenge, and every kill is him acting through the part of himself he was told to cut away.

The whole film works as a sideways take on forced medical 'normalization.' The brothers were split by doctors who decided the deformed twin shouldn't exist, and the revenge plot is the body refusing that verdict, hunting down the experts who tried to edit it. The seedy 42nd Street setting matters here too: it's the place society shoves what it doesn't want seen, the same instinct that put Belial under the knife.

Sharon represents the impossible exit from the bond, and the story can't allow it. Duane's brief shot at a normal romance is the one thing that threatens the twins' fused identity, so the ending drags both of them back into a single fate. The relationship was always doomed because Duane was never really one person free to leave.

Duane Bradley checks into a fleabag 42nd Street hotel carrying a padlocked wicker basket and a wad of cash. Inside the basket is Belial, the deformed lump of a brother surgeons hacked off him as a child against both boys' will. Now the twins are reunited and working through a kill list of every doctor who held the saw. Telepathically bonded, they hunt as one, until Duane meets a girl and Belial feels the pull of jealousy. Henenlotter turns a tale of grief and separation into a grimy grindhouse fairy tale soaked in latex and rage.