Basket Case: The Times Square Body-Horror Fable

Tue, 24 Dec 2024 11:00:00 +0000

A young man checks into a filthy Times Square hotel carrying a large wicker basket. He is polite, jumpy, and he pays cash. Inside the basket is his brother. This is the premise of Basket Case, Frank Henenlotter’s 1982 debut, made for around thirty-five thousand dollars on 16mm film in the last days of grindhouse New York, and it remains one of the purest examples of a truth the genre keeps proving and forgetting: that a low budget spent on the right idea outlives any amount of money spent on the wrong one.

Grindhouse Double Bills and the Death of 42nd Street

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 13:00:00 +0000

Ask a young cinephile what “grindhouse” means and you will usually get a description of a look: scratched prints, missing reels, jump-splices, over-saturated colour, a fake “our feature presentation” bumper. That look is an invention of the 2000s, a nostalgic costume assembled by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez for their 2007 double feature and copied a thousand times since. The real thing was never a genre or an aesthetic. It was a way of watching, tied to a specific few blocks of Manhattan, and when those blocks were redeveloped the way of watching died. What survives is a memory of a room, and a shelf of films that room built.

Grindhouse - vo.rs

Basket Case: The Times Square Body-Horror Fable

Grindhouse Double Bills and the Death of 42nd Street