Basement Jack

Let me start off by saying this movie is not the best movie out there by any means.

Its story is interesting at best and it really tries to make the killer have a personage and back story, so that you do not just see him as another murderer. On the other hand the actor playing Jack does a horrible job. To illustrate how horrible I thought his performance was, I will describe it this way: Every time I saw him on screen I wanted to gouge out my eyes with a spoon and jam chopsticks into my ears to pierce my brain so I would no longer have to see or hear anything he does ever again.If it were up to me I would run him out of town and never let him work again. Over the top? Maybe. You be the judge. It seems the only godsend of this movie was Michelle Morrow the actress playing Karen Cook. In my opinion, in these types of movies the killer should outperform the others in the sense of acting skills, but the exact opposite was the case. She was the star of the film hands down and the others are forgettable.

The only reason to see this movie is to get a chuckle out of the acting. It is a rent at best.

Basement Jack was tortured by his mother growing up before he kills her and goes on a killing spree murdering family's during storms. He is released and the murders start up again. Yeah this is low budget but you can really tell the director tried with this. It was shot well and it had some good gore. All the acting is pretty terrible bar the main girl and weird choices were made like having a British speaking police officer in a small American town. It tried a little too hard in parts with some humor like the porn watching scene at the police station but the killer was suitably creepy and the gore was good for the budget they had.

BASEMENT JACK is another cheap slasher movie, an independent straight-to-DVD effort that looks and feels exactly the same as at least a dozen others. It has the old greyed-out colour palette look going on, alongside a non-threatening villain, lots of cheap gore effects, and a strictly pedestrian narrative.

The titular character is a psychotic who choses bad weather as a time to go around menacing innocent families. There are a lot of scenes shot in rooms filled with blood sprayed over the walls and the like, but the emphasis is on graphic kill sequences as Jack goes around slaughtering all in his path.

He's an irredeemable villain, but the kills have zero impact because there's no characterisation here whatsoever. There is some talk in an attempt to build a proper story, but none of it is very interesting. The best cast member they could come up with is Tiffany Shepis, who started out as a Troma starlet. I found BASEMENT JACK tired and distasteful, and I couldn't help wondering why I was bothering to watch it.

Young man is tortured with a 9 volt battery by mother as a kid and turns into a killer only during thunderstorms.

If you buy into that premise, you might also like the bad acting, horrible script, the dead victims whose eyes are literally blinking and moving on screen, and storms without rain.

I didn't.

Characters actions simply don't make sense. Not sure if you've ever licked a 9 volt battery. I have. It doesn't hurt in the slightest. You feel a dull tingle. That's how we'd test to see if they were good as kids. None of us turned into serial killers.

And why do so many of the corpses move when they're supposed to be dead?

Didn't anyone see this during the editing?

IMDD says this movie had a million dollar budget.

Where did the money go?

A boy is abused by his cruel mother (well played by Scream Queen Lynn Lowry). 11 years on, released from a mental institution, he becomes known as Basement Jack, slaughtering families during thunderstorms! Yeap! Thunderstorms. And there are a lot of them throughout this movie, to the point where the rolling sound of thunder and flashes of lightning becomes rather tedious. This is the directional debut of Michael Shelton and so when reviewing this movie has to be taken into account. He's not directed another movie since. The film makers are obviously horror fans and have tried to make a slasher movie with all of the ingredients that we know and love (sex, gore, brutality, creepy killer, atmosphere, jump shocks, etc), so I give them credit for that. However the end product is really rather mediocre at best. But trust me, there are MUCH worse slasher movies out there. We do get two Scream Queens here, Lynn Lowry and Tiffany Shepsis, so credit for that also, Sadly the bad outweighs the good: plenty of gore, but the CGI is very cheap and fake looking; during one of the kills the knife clearly misses its victim; the police are very inept, despite many of their number getting killed there is a lack of seriousness amongst the survivors; acting varies from acceptable to wooden; dull script; the film was a bit of a drag at 94 minutes. And then there's Jack, looks more like a Goth on heroin than a serious mass murderer. If you love slasher movies, or you are a fan of Scream Queens, then Basement Jack does have a little something to offer. But I for one will not be giving it a repeat viewing.