Monday, October 24, 2011

Basement (2010, Asham Kamboj)

In my on-going quest for high-end or just plain notable cinema, I have seen some grade-A shit in my time. Honest-to-goodness, down-n-dirty, so-bad-it's-fucking-heinous flicks. Many of which belong to the horror genre, seeing as how horror remains my primary interest. Perhaps I'm just in an odd "funk" at this time, but I don't seem to recall having experienced a film as utterly worthless, non-structured, and just all-around cinematically incompetent as "Basement".

Basic plot set-up: a group of anti-war college protester shitheads take a pit stop in the woods during a trip and all find their way into an underground maze of leaky pipes and lurking creatures (?)...

The "hook" is that certain members of their party may be involved in some kind of secret experiment having to do with locking people in this subterranean labyrinth with hooded women dressed like ninjas. Sorta like a few other, far superior psychological horror films, such as "The Hole" and "Cube". Not only does "Basement" never come close to being one shard of a fraction as gripping as either of those films, but it goes stumbling SO ass backwards into nonsense, that when the abrupt and highly unexplained ending whisked by, I was almost in shock. It all falls under a relatively short run-time, consisting of undeveloped characters, an infuriatingly slow build-up, puny amounts of gore, repetitive dialog, and, AGAIN, a "twist" ending with a hilariously pro-war slant that HAD to have been blurted out on the spot during the last few minutes of production. There's NO WAY that this particular idea had been written down and approved, in some way, by others involved...

I can't express further my absolute contempt for "Basement" and legitimate confusion as how even a semi-functioning human mind could've went along with this. Absolutely atrocious.

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