Brink DVD | Buy at Amazon | Review by Doug Waltz
Little Jack Riley has the unfortunate luck to have the craziest mother in the world. She believes that the only way to punish her child properly is to hit him with electricity. And she's smart about it, too. She starts off when he's a baby with 9-volt batteries and works her way up until she's chaining him up outside in thunderstorms. Mrs. Riley, to put it mildly, is off her nut.
Eventually Jack decides enough is enough and slaughters his mother. With his mind unhinged he goes on a killing spree until he is stopped while slaughtering Karen Cook's family. She's the only survivor.
Now, fifteen years later Jack is released from the asylum and he wants to finish what he started and a storm is on the way. He begins a line of slaughter that will take him to Karen who has been waiting for this confrontation for years. She is ready to exact revenge for what Basement Jack did to her family.
BASEMENT JACK tries to go back to the good old days of 80's slasher flicks. You get the unstoppable killer and his victim and the endless game of cat and mouse as he slaughters anything that gets in his way. On first watch I was really ready to crucify this flick. It just didn't seem to have that mystical 'it' that makes the slasher genre work as well as it does.
Then I let it marinate for a while.
I think my knee-jerk reaction of hatred was because this flick is EXACTLY what it should be. The director has managed to capture the lightning in a bottle that the slasher genre was. His bad guy is perfect and just creepy, especially when he dons the lower half of a doll face to cover the lower half of his face. But that's not what makes this flick.
It's Lynn Lowry.
Any fan of the horror genre will recognize the name from such classics as THE CRAZIES (the original, not the abominable remake) and I DRINK YOUR BLOOD. In this film Ms. Lowry embraces her inner crazy and does such unspeakable things that it makes the mind boggle. Forcing her child to watch her have sex with strangers so he'll know how. Electrocuting him for the slightest infraction. Loving a large doll more than her own son to put him in his place. It's unfortunate that this flick will probably get swept under the rug because Ms. Lowry gives an award deserving performance in BASEMENT JACK. And she is the glue that holds it all together with her numerous appearances in flashback as Jack cuts a bloody swath through a small town community.
The kills are numerous and inventive. The film keeps you wondering with a couple of interesting red herrings and there is no lack of odd ball characters.
My single complaint is the waste of Tiffany Shepis. Ms. Shepis is one of the more talented of the modern day scream queens and this role seemed so forced and tacked on that I wonder why she took it. Maybe because she got to keep her clothes on. She should understand that if you make a career of taking your clothes off and people are fans of your work for that reason that maybe staying dressed isn't such a good career move.
Other than that BASEMENT JACK is a worthy addition to the slasher genre.
