Basement Jack -2009
Director : Michael Shelton
Writer : Brian Patrick O'Toole
Genre : Slasher/suspense horror
Rating : R
Running Time :
Cast : Michele Morrow, Eric Peter-Kaiser, Lynn Lowry, Nathan Bexton
This film was made on a budget less than $500,000, "Basement Jack", is a teen themed slasher filck basically shot in Yuppie fashion, meaning its shot more for style and edgy look than story, grit or substance. The script does have its weaknesses, and characters make classic cliché mistakes all thru the movie and deliver some weak dialogue but the filmakers attempt to give their killer an empathetic backstory (which they tried to hard in my opinon) and ends up making the Killer one-dimensional). The movie starts at a very , slow pace.....in short it draggs and draggs.
Basement Jack starts out eleven years ago as tormented teenager John Reily (producer Eric Peter-Kaiser) goes nuts & kills several families including the boyfriend, mother, father & brother of Karen Cook (Michele Morrow) who manages to survive the brutal attack. Reily is caught but since he was underage he only spent ten years in prison & now he is free, free to hunt Karen down across the US & see to unfinished business from ten years previous by finally killing her. However Karen survived Reily's attempts to kill her once & she is determined to do so again & teams up with small town rookie cop Chris Watts (Sam Skoryna) to put an end to Reily's killing & finally lay some ghost's to rest. There's a bit of gore here but the kills are very Hamey with various stabbings here and there, an arm is cut off & the tops of two cops heads are wacked off too, complete with very bad CGI computer effects. As one would expect there's the obligatory final confrontation between Karen & the killer with expected results & a really bad ending which uses the old 'he wasn't dead even though he was' trick to leave things open for a possible sequel. There are a lot of thunder storms in Basement Jack but there's never any rain (probably due to budgetary reasons), now I don't know if in reality it's possible to have a thunder storm without rain & maybe it is but it just looks strange, it doesn't feel as atmospheric & is just odd (also why is the thunder always as loud inside as it is outside?).
The cast are OK but no-one really stands out particularly except, Michele Marrow. Dam, she is a hottie! I was really shocked I haven't seen her in more films but will be looking for her in other projects. I just wasn't entertained by this film for many reasons, acting, casting, continuity, bad CgI effects. And mostly because the killer himself "JACK" just did'nt work for a deranged lunatic Killer. In these types of films the Killer should always tower over the Good guys and in this case the Good girls!
4/10 Stars