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Friday March 29th 2024

Basket Case | 1982

Basket Case location: Franklin Street, Tribeca, New York
Basket Case location: Franklin Street, Tribeca, New York

Enjoyably grungy horror comedy with Duane (Kevin van Hentenryck) and his evolutionarily challenged ex-conjoined twin Belial, out for revenge on the doctors who separated them.

Filmed in countless locations around New York city, on the kind of budget that barely runs to shoestrings, studio work was out of the question. The movie was filmed in friends' houses at Glens Falls, on the Hudson River north of Albany, I-87; as well as various New York lofts, offices and private apartments.

Duane and his trusty basket wander the old 42nd Street of porno theatres before the city’s big clean-up. Don’t believe the end credits, which seem to have been designed to fool location hounds. There was no ‘Hotel Broslin’.

The exterior of the seedy ‘hotel’ was an office building at 80 Franklin Street, Tribeca, where the service elevator was temporarily converted into a hotel reception desk.

The neon ‘Broslin’ sign, from which Duane dangles, was attached to a fire escape on Hubert Street at Hudson Street, a few blocks to the east.

The bar is an amalgam of two Greenwich Village bars, both seen in the controversial 1980 Cruising: they are Badlands, 388 West Street at Christopher Street; and what was, for a while, the notorious S&M Hellfire Club. It’s now classy Italian restaurant Vento, 14th Street at Ninth Avenue in the Red Triangle Building, West Village, which became Ed Harris’s apartment block in The Hours.