The bizarre story is about two siamese twins, Duane and Belial Bradley, separated at birth. Duane looks more or less like you and me while Belial looks like a piece of clay attached to Duane's side. Out for revenge upon the doctors that separated them, Duane now carries his beloved brother in a basket case, feeding him with hamburgers. Only life ain't easy for the two brothers and they are soon in trouble.

The chaotic shooting is also worth mentioning, even admiring. Henenlotter and Ievins were already broke before the shooting began, having spent all their savings upon the preparations. They were forced to film all in-door scenes at a shabby hooker hotel, with street-bums and lunatics shouting and yelling outside the windows, demanding money for keeping their mouths shut. Then in the middle of shooting someone discovered that they had only enough film left to shoot the rest of the movie on first takes. Which meant that they only miked for dialogue and overdubbed everything else later. The two filmmakers later did all the dubbing themselves, then, in a wonderful attempt at "method-dubbing", got dressed up in women's clothes in order to sound like old hookers. Henenlotter also decided to do his own stop-motion effects in the scene in which Belial runs amuck in his hotel room. Proudly did he told Fangoria that he first moved Belial very carefully around for about the first five clips of film, but soon grew impatient and simply kicked the damn puppet around with his foot, hitting the TV to the floor. It may not look very pretty on screen, but such wonderfully slack moviemaking adds much needed comic effect to the result and helped to make Basket Case the perhaps most talked about cult favorite for years.

Thanks to this sudden fame, Henenlotter managed to raise money for his first "real" movie, Brain Damage in 1988, by many still considered his best movie (and it's actually very good). He promised to never make a sequel to Basket Case, but in 1990 he nontheless offered one. But after the tired Basket Case 3-The Progeny in 1992 he apparently got tired of making movies all together. He still turn in the odd cameo performance in other people's movies, but hasn't to my knowledge directed anything special since. But as they say, one masterpiece is enough to justify the life's work of a true author...