Do You Like My Basement

Relishing in its micro-budget, 'The Cellar' - otherwise known as 'Do You Like My Basement' - is set almost entirely in one location. Claustrophobic, unsettling, and viewed mainly through the camera lens of film-maker Stanley Farmer (Charlie Floyd), this cellar plays host to visiting characters who are well played and often a little larger than life. This lifts the story and stops it becoming as dull as such a thin story might otherwise have been.

Not that there isn't incident, and some of it impressively nasty. Farmer is an impressive narrator, never letting the fact that his filmic efforts have thus far been ignored. He is clearly determined to make what is almost a snuff movie, possibly for his own entertainment, or possibly to 'break' the market - despite the fact that he is desperately unhinged.

I enjoyed this. It has a vein of dark humour running through it - imagine a cut-price Saw film featuring a Jigsaw wannabe. What it lacks in sophistication, it makes up for in the seedy isolated obsession of its main character. My score is 7 out of 10.

OK, for a microscopical budget, the movie acted like it supposed to: simple, natural, nothing out of the ordinary. Positive aspects: the acting, believe it or not, was good, damn good I might say for some "off the street" actors, the main one had a great voice, which sustained the plot heavily, cause it mostly relies on it, the place picked, again, a good choice, simple, effective and slightly claustrophobic.

Is it a horror tho? Is it something like "The rise of Leslie Vernon"?, or "The hills run red"? No. Far from it actually. It's a movie, filmed, showing how one wants to make a movie, a whole lot of talking and a bad ending in my opinion.

So reasons to recommend? If you like horror generally, and you wanna see one to pass some time, this one won't do. You could get bored. You will get bored. It all could have been saved with a greater ending, but it looks like they lost all inspiration there. Till that point tho, better than average, good use of a really small budget, could even be called a small inspiration to others. Rather than rely on useless, horrible CGI, try something that won't upset the eye, but intrigue the brain.

Anyway, sadly, "Do you like my basement" is a movie that wanted to succeed, but in a race against itself, it managed to finish last.