Friday, January 20, 2006

The Girl in the Basement (1996)

     Another flick that’s NOT in IMDB. This little Indie entry lived in a funny kinda niche. Its not gorey, but there’s a little violence. It’s sort of like a “Scrapbook” lite. I thought it was funny that they were trying to make this whole violence against a defenseless woman, but it fails, as the woman is much stronger than the man. The “reveal” at the end to show why the guy is as messed up as he is was clever, but still a little weak.

The commentary for this movie is very revealing, as the director died two years after making the movie, killed by a mugger. That puts kinda a weird little spin on things. Plus, the producer and the actor reveal that it was made for $15,000. It was shot on 16mm on short ends. I didn’t even know that there would be short ends for 16mm. I can’t believe that in 1996 anyone was still shooting movies in 16mm to make short ends. (For those of you who don’t listen to lots of commentaries, short ends are the remainders of rolls of film after shooting. Film shops sell them real cheap, because you can only shoot real short scenes with them, and then you gotta change reels again.) If they had no budget, why they didn’t just shot it on video is beyond me. It certainly wouldn’t have looked any worse, as 16mm looks pretty grainy once you go to DVD resolution.

Anywho, this is not a bad little flick, it just doesn’t excel at anything. Its funny, as the producer says in the commentary that it was an 18 day shoot. Since there’s only about 5 locations, anyone who knew what they were doing should have been able to shoot this movie in about 5 days. And if you don’t pay anyone, then just spend it all on a digital camera and lights, and $15K is about right. Watch this only if don’t like extreme violence, but want to deal with psycho’s who kidnap women. If you have the stomach, watch the superior “Scrapbook” by Eric Stanze.

Three beers out of five.