Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

‘Basement Jack’ starts with loverboy over here in the back seat of a car trying to get a piece off his pretty girlfriend Karen (Michelle Morrow). There are some peculiar things about this attempt at love. For starters loverboy has something along the lines of CNN playing on his radio during this attempt at love. Perhaps a Barry White CD would’ve been more appropriate. Of course a Barry White CD wouldn’t have interrupted itself to inform us about the ritualistic murders of families in close proximity to where our kids are located so we’ll go ahead and roll with it. Then after a branch falls on the car completely cop blocking loverboy’s full court press, the duo gets out the car and start walking someplace. I’m wondering where the hell they’re walking to in the middle of a thunderstorm, but it turns out they’re walking into Karen’s house. These kids are parked ten feet in front of Karen’s house, Karen’s family in the house, trying to have sex in a parked car. Hmmm… that’s odd. Crazy kids.

Anyway Basement Jack (Eric-Peter Kaiser) has murdered up Karen’s family and set them up all nice and neat at the dinner table then murders loverboy, which did look pretty cool, and then tries to kill Karen, but that girl has survival instincts for your ass. Then Karen runs out of the house followed by Jack with a cop waiting outside who opens fire. Again, maybe this should cop should wait to see what the hell is going on before opening fire but there you go. As it turns out I don’t even know who he shot, if anybody, because as we will soon find out both Karen and Jack are just dandy.

Fast forward ten years and we see Karen hitchhiking across the land when she flags down a Nissan Pathfinder that stops for her. Again, this is strange because as she walks up to this truck she finds that half of the drivers face is missing. I guess Jack did this? How does a person drive a Nissan with half his face missing? Wouldn’t he drive to the hospital as opposed to driving aimlessly down a deserted highway? I don’t know. Anyway Karen has wheels and cruises into the next town. Here Karen meets officer Watts (Chris Skoryna) who is a rookie. They tell us constantly that he is a rookie, in addition to being a completely crappy cop, but we’re not going to get into that. You see Karen is following the trail of terror left behind by Jack, who was released from his mental ward about a year ago. Jack was a minor when he went on his initial trail of terror. It’s his mom’s fault. Jack, for his part, is also following Karen to close that loophole he left open ten years ago.

Now as bad a cop as Officer Watts seems to be, those above him are far worse. Jack is in town straight up murdering people and in between watching porn on their computers, they think are wide-eyed blond cutie might be the murderer. Remember that movie ‘The Terminator’? Keep that in mind. One way or another… this ends tonight. Or not. I mean it’s a horror movie with an unstoppable killer who has a nickname and a mask. It only ends when and if this flick stops making money.

For the most part I was bored by ‘Basement Jack’ with the majority of my entertainment coming from the strange things the characters in this movie were doing. And actress Lynn Lowery who played Jack’s mom. Joan Crawford thinks Miss Riley needs to ease off the abuse pedal a little bit. Lynn Lowery almost closes the book on bad mothers in movies because she was damn effective in this film. This has nothing to do with anything but for whatever reason the IMDB lists Ms. Lowery’s physical dimensions and in the year 1973, being 34B-23-36 which is impressive in any year but we are astute enough to know that they probably wouldn’t even be mentioned if she wasn’t naked somewhere which led us to an oft used Google Images Search. Ooooh Ms. Lowery… you naughty girl…

As far as the core of the movie goes, this being Jack doing what Jack does, it just didn’t interest me all that much. Basement Jack didn’t do much to separate himself from the other list of unstoppable mask wearing, big ass knife wielding, 6’5" 250 pound, Red Wing Boot sporting, long haired hippie looking loons that have come before him. He has mommy issues, he hates teenagers who have sex but he does have one added extra in his hatred of electricity. An extension of his mommy issues, an issue he probably should be thanking mommy for in retrospect, which again leads to another strange action in our cops tazing this guy when they finally have him cornered, a guy who has killed up pretty much half their town and all of their cops. I’m thinking repeated shotgun blasts to the head would be more appropriate since I’m not looking to take Jack to trial, but then that just the LAPD in me trying to get out I guess.

It is a nice looking movie and it is pretty well acted, but the combination of the odd character actions, weird situations, stupid cops and The Manager (Nathan Bexton) floating around, in addition to Basement Jack himself not separating himself from his murderous colleagues made it difficult for me to wrap my arms around my man and his movie. Lynn Lowery though… best supporting actress in a straight to DVD horror movie… if such an award show exists.