All the way from 1973, Don’t Look in the Basement, which originally went by the title The Forgotten. The original is the better title – there isn’t much basement action going on here – and a more apt one, since this is something of a forgotten horror oddity.
Being 1973 there’s something overtly and covertly pornified about it. Overtly in the casting of Playboy cover star Rosie Holotik as a new nurse at an out-of-the-way asylum run by one Dr Stephens (Michael Harvey).
Covertly in the way it feels like it’s about to break into hot hardcore action at any moment. It never does. Some fairly random bare breasts to one side (in your face, in fact) it leaves the sex to other movies.
Dr Stephens is a kindly psychiatrist. So kindly, in fact, that he fails to notice an axe coming his way and is dead only seconds after we’ve met him in the film’s opening moments, leaving the running of the asylum to his number two, Dr Masters (Annabelle Weenick, billed here as Anne MacAdams).
It’s here that Nurse Beale (Holotik) makes her appearance, right after the death of Dr Stephens. Now shorthanded and miles from civilisation, Dr Masters reluctantly gives her a job. Why she’s reluctant to take the new nurse on will be revealed in the fullness of time.
The place where the story plays out isn’t so much a lunatic asylum, or “sanitarium”, as the big sign outside this out-of-the-way building declares? It’s more your old-school nuthouse, lifted almost intact from a 1930s movie and populated with crazies.
They are crazies too, rather than gently neurodivergent people trying to find acceptance in the world. This is a tale of the batshit crazy going absolutely batshit crazy once the steadying hand of Dr Stephens has left the scene.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Nice, innocent Nurse Beale gets to know the inmates. Among them there’s Sam (Bill McGhee) the lobotomised simpleton. Sarge (Hugh Feagin), still in his mind fighting the Vietnam war. Sex-mad Allyson (Betty Chandler). Demented Mrs Callingham (Rhea MacAdams), who believes that flowers are her children. Psychotic Danny (Jessie Kirby). Painfully withdrawn Jennifer (Harryette Warren). Harriet (Camilla Carr), nursing a doll as if it were a child. And the Judge (Gene Ross), who might or might not once have been an actual judge but either way demands to be treated with dignity.
It’s unlikely any of the inmates/actors will be familiar but one of the real successes of SF Brownrigg’s direction is the performances he gets from his cast. Committed, you might say.
Brownrigg had no budget for this movie and shot it all in 12 days. There are obvious technical shortcomings – the sound is boomy, for instance – but it actually adds to the dislocated sense of something being slightly off.
The wonky sound feeds into a creepy and ghoulish sense of paranoia neatly conjured by coloured lights, stark shadows, the camera often aslant or up in the faces of the actors. The music is by Robert Farrar and mixes up 1960s instrumentation (harpsichord, bass flute, vibes) with a jangly almost spaghetti western atmosphere at times. It’s too loud, deliberately, and adds to the sense of impending nastiness. And death, when it comes in this film, is either ingenious or nasty or both.
If there’s an underlying theme it might be the folly of the anti-psychiatry movement, as most famously espoused by RD Laing. There’s a distinct lack of drugs or therapy being administered at this institute and the crazies are not locked up at night. Instead everyone is encouraged to act as if they were all some big happy family. Which is fine until things start going wrong.
Which it does in a way that does not hold back. There’s a reason why this movie ended up on the infamous list of “video nasties” in the UK. It’s now deemed OK enough for 15 year olds to see, which seems sensible – there was a lot of hysterical over-reaction in the 1980s and while this couldn’t be described as good clean fun, there’s not much that’s too epically nasty about it… apart from its mood.
Don’t Look in the Basement – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
