“Don’t Look in the Basement” - A Look Back at WOR-TV

Released: 1973

Director: S.F. Brownrigg

Writers: Thomas Pope & Tim Pope

Starring: Bill McGhee, Rosie Holotik, Gene Ross, Annabelle Weenick

“Dini is insane!  She’s gonna kill me and she’s gonna kill you!!”

New York City television viewers had a plethora of channels to choose from in the 1970s.  And by plethora, I mean seven.  I know, I know…you're jealous.

Aside from the three major networks and PBS, New York also boasted a then-rare three independent stations.  In what surely helped forge my personality, these three broadcasters LOVED to show movies.

WNEW and WPIX introduced me to such early drive-in classics as Zombies of Mora Tau, The Giant Gila Monster, and The Flesh Eaters.

WOR-TV, on the other hand, brought the hard stuff.  True F’dup Flix, direct from 42nd Street.  Films like S.F. Brownrigg’s sleazy shocker, Don't Look in the Basement.

Oh, yeah.  Another cool thing about WOR-TV?  They often showed the films uncut!

WOR-TV made headlines for this very reason when it aired the television premier of The Deer Hunter in November, 1980.  CBS had initially bought broadcast rights to the Academy Award winning film but later backed out of the deal when their Standards & Practices dept. couldn't figure out how to edit around the Russian roulette scenes.

RKO General, WOR-TV’s parent company, then stepped in, scooped up the telecast rights, and solved the problem easily.  They slapped a disclaimer on the front of the film and showed The Deer Hunter in its entirety.  Fuck Standards & Practices!

As shocked as some people might have been (and they were), this was hardly news to my friends and I.  We all knew – even if our parents did not – that WOR-TV had been airing unedited programs for years...and not just award-winning stuff.

We first uncovered this little secret when The Benny Hill Show took America by storm in 1976.  Benny Hill was a vaudeville comic who’d been making specials for British TV since the ‘50s.  As the British are far less puritanical than us Americans, Hill’s skits occasionally included a glimpse of bare breasts.

Imagine my surprise the first time I saw one of Hill’s bawdier skits air intact on WOR-TV.  To paraphrase a sketch from Monty Python (another British import that occasionally featured brief nudity): “What’s that on the telly?”  “Looks like a nipple!”

Obviously, this became quite the topic of schoolyard conversation.

Around that same time, WOR-TV started airing a bunch of newer, and rougher, horror and exploitation films.  Psychomania, The Mad Bomber (a/k/a Police Connection), ChildrenShouldn't Play with Dead Things, Deathdream, and The Crazies all popped up with regularity…and nary a hint of a splice. 

At least, at first.

See, the first time you’d catch one of these flicks, it might contain a bit of nudity, some gore and foul language.  Then, the next time it ran, maybe it would play just as you remembered it, or maybe you’d find the nudity was suddenly gone.  The time after that, the violence might have been toned down.  Finally, and for all subsequent broadcasts, the profanity would have been removed, and the conversion of the film from transgressive art to unintelligible bore was now complete.

It was a race against time!

You had to catch these flicks early in their runs, before the complaints poured in and the scissors came out!  So, my friends and I did our best to keep each other informed about which titles to keep an eye on.

Don’t Look in the Basement first hit my radar when I was in 9th grade.  One day in Social Studies class, a friend asked if I had seen "that crazy film the other night."  When I said I hadn't, he proceeded to tell me the very end.

His capsule summary (spoilers, duh!):  "A mental patient chops up everyone in the nuthouse with an axe, and then sits down to suck on a popsicle. "  He may have given away the ending, but he got my attention

I ran home and tore through TV Guide to find the name of this gem.  There it is!  Don't Look in the Basement.

Luckily, since this was WOR-TV, the movie aired again in what seemed like mere weeks.  In my memory, that broadcast, my first viewing, occurred late on Saturday night, long after everyone else was asleep.  However, according to James Arena in his awesome book, “Fright Night on Channel 9” (a precursor of which is available here), Don't Look in the Basement didn't air again in that slot for years.  

Maybe my friend saw the film outside of the “Fright Night” showcase, and I caught the midnight run.  Maybe I caught a 4pm re-airing some weekday afternoon.  Either way, I was unprepared for what I was about to see.

Don't Look in the Basement was my first exposure to “regional horror” filmmaking, films made outside of Hollywood and New York that used the local color of their surroundings to their advantage.  Yes, you could argue that Night of the LivingDead is a regional horror film.  However, as my home state of New Jersey shares a border with Pennsylvania, that film took place in what felt like MY region.  Don’t Look in the Basement quite clearly did not...

Don’t Look in the Basement was filmed in Texas, but at heart it is a full-blown Southern gothic.  Isolation, unchecked desires, shared sins and shame...   It’s every Tennessee Williams play ever written, acted out in an insane asylum.  The film opens and closes with an ax murder, but in between it’s pretty much a family melodrama, albeit one where the underlying emotions are played at top volume.  Yep, this one goes to 11.

Detractors of the film have three main knocks. 

The first is that the film was made by amateurs.  Not true.

Three of the four leads had acting careers before and after (Bill McGhee, Annabelle Weenick, and Gene Ross) and the fourth (Rosie Holotik) was a Playboy model, hardly the first to make the leap from glossy pages to silver screen…

Even Brownrigg, himself, worked on other films before his debut as director, most notably with a couple of other regional horror players, Irvin Berwick (Strange Compulsion) and Larry Buchanan (Zontar: Thing from Venus).  For my money, Brownrigg is a better filmmaker than either.

Setting aside the factual inaccuracy, one could still make a case that the film is “amateurish.”  It is very low budget and contains a number of unorthodox choices in both direction and performance.  But if by “amateurish” you mean “without skill,” I’ll still fight you.

True, some of the performances are completely unmodulated.  The constant cackling of spoiled brat Danny (Jessie Kirby) and the 0-60 mood swings, from childish coos to “I’ll kill you”s, by baby mama Harriet (Camilla Carr), grate on the nerves like nails on a chalkboard.   Likewise, Brownrigg’s pervasive use of intense close-ups – often too close for comfort – seem like technical gaffes.

Combined, these details make every synapse in your brain scream: “get me outta here!”  Of course, that response dovetails nicely with final girl Nurse Beale’s increasingly agitated emotional state.

So, are these regrettable mistakes or crude, yet effective, devices designed to put you into an uncomfortable headspace?

Even conceding the histrionics and sometimes-stilted dialog, Gene Ross’s performance as The Judge shines through as a minor miracle.  His part is completely under-written, forcing the actor to repeat one line of dialog again and again (“Oliver W. Cameron, adjudicator...”) while most of the rest is a jumble of quasi-legalese (“The verdict is unanimous.”). 

And yet, and yet… Through faraway stares and well-chosen pauses, Ross manages to convince us that some completely different movie plays out behind his eyes.  And whatever his unexplored backstory might be, it haunts him.

The second most common knock against the film is that the “twist” is too easy to figure out.

Well, first off, there are two “twists” in the film and, clearly, Brownrigg and writers Tim and Thomas Pope aren’t hiding either.   This is not The Sixth Sense, we’re talking about here.  More to the point, it isn’t any of the OTHER Shyamalan films, whose success depends entirely on a twist that proves lame.

The fact that Dr. Masters, the woman who runs the asylum with an iron first, is actually a patient, is hinted at throughout, from her odd line of questioning during Nurse Beale’s interview (“They knew about your coming here?”) to the close-up of her hiding the identity card of one of the residents.  Had the filmmakers intended this to be a mind-blowing revelation, they would not have dropped such hints.

Furthermore, the twist is revealed to the audience less than an hour into the film, and then to the unwitting Nurse Beale a mere 10 minutes later.  So, there are still 20 minutes of story left once everyone knows the big secret and these turn out to be the best 20 minutes of the entire movie.

As for the second twist, that plays right into the third common complaint about the film: The title makes no sense.

Wrong, again!

The second twist is that the good doctor who started the whole experimental living arrangement at this sanitarium is alive!  He survived the ax attack at the beginning of the film and has been hidden away in the basement by man-child Sam and Dr. ...er, patient Masters.

Again, whether or not this reveal comes as a surprise is beside the point.  The true horror from the situation reveals itself when the terrified Beale ventures into the basement and mistakenly beats the wounded doctor to death (with Sam’s boat, no less) when he grabs at her from beneath the stairs.

So, yes, the title has meaning.  (By the way, IMDb lists this film under an alternate title, The Forgotten.  Although I’ve never seen the film show anywhere under that title, even IT makes sense, as the name could refer to both the doctor, left to bleed in the basement, as well as the inmates themselves, who hope to be left alone.)

Putting to rest any remaining assertions that the film is poorly made, I submit the last 20 minutes, which are clearly crafted with the utmost of care.

As the clinic descends into depravity on the final night, Nurse Beale encounters one horror after another: dead bodies, necrophilia, loss of identity, betrayal...  It’s like a garrote, that you didn’t even feel slipped around your throat, slowly tightening.

Equally impressive is Sam’s back-to-back-to-back change of heart from gentle giant, to hulking captor, to avenging angel.  Although the turns occur with breakneck speed, the seeds for these swings are sown from the earliest scenes in the film, so his actions feel motivated and logical.

Also, I should add, that Sam’s final scene, the one which my friend supposedly spoiled, plays even BETTER than described.  Sam’s final cries of despair, as he sucks on his popsicle, are truly heart breaking.

Re-watching the film today, I’m astounded at how closely the uncut DVD matches up with my memories of that initial viewing on WOR-TV.  The ax murders, tongue removal, death by spindle, leering come-ons and, of course, the blood-drenched finale are all pretty much as I remembered.  A few instances of nudity might have been trimmed, but I can’t say for certain as the film boasts plenty of side-boob, which certainly aired as-is.

40 years on, I’m struck by the fact that some regional filmmakers at one end of the country, and a regional broadcaster at the other, both broke the rules to serve up an uncompromising film to what they hoped would be a receptive audience.

I know it was the ‘70s, but still... They must have been crazy!

Footnotes:

1. The pictures on this page are screengrabs from VCI Home Video’s DVD release, which appears to be out of print.  The photos are heavily compressed and do not represent the actual PQ of this release, but, frankly, every DVD version I’ve seen is full-frame, from an analog tape source, and looks pretty poor.