Monday, March 28, 2011

Basement

"Face your deepest fears", says the tagline. That's right. You may have just wasted your money on the most useless film ever.

A few years ago my friends and I got into the habit of buying naff knockdown price DVDs for a laugh.

Two spring to mind, an American B-horror called The Dentist and an even worse one sporting the unbeatable title The Nosepicker. Proper cheap cheap cheap tacky dim-witted crap. We were pissing ourselves laughing at the crassness of the acting, the story, the soundtrack.

But it was great. There is something uniquely endearing about rubbish films.

In the unlikely event you may have heard of 2010's Basement, please be warned that it does not even make it into the above-described category. We are talking about something else here. Levels of nothingness that not even the most cynical of viewers could have anticipated.

Basement is the equivalent of being served a completely rancid dinner at a restaurant. Or the equivalent of buying a new suit only to discover that it's made of meat wrappers selotaped together.

What is unbelievable is the idea that someone, somewhere, thought that this thing could be knocked together, let alone produced, and that nobody along the way was honest enough to tell the director, the screenwriter, the producers or whoever that perhaps jacking it in would have been a more dignified move.

There's no danger of a spoiler because this film is about nothing. In theory the premises are interesting, not miles away from The Hole: a group of people are lost in the woods and end up in a dark and creepy basement. "Wow", you'd think, "Great!".

No it isn't. Because that's where it all ends. You wait and wait while the characters redraw the boundaries of the expression "dead end" and, within half hour, it's quite obvious that nowt's ever gonna happen.

The rest is some sort of tedious, repetititive, shallow, unengaging and inconsequential bilge. It goes nowhere. It says nothing. It's not even dumb. I guess it's the closest a film ever got to representing the concept of nothingness which, in a way, you could argue is actually an achievement.

Oh, and by the way, the acting is the worst ever. By far. Times ten.

"Basement" is like a Year-9 project carried out by a group of kids messing about with some recording equipment. Except worse.

Avoid.

2 comments:

Lori said...

If it's brilliantly rubbish movies you love, you have to try "Shoot 'em Up" with Clive Owen

"A man named Mr. Smith delivers a woman's baby during a shootout, and is then called upon to protect the newborn from the army of gunmen."

Ridiculous story but really good

Andy said...

Excellent stuff, but I feel I have to correct you by saying it's The Nostril Picker :)