The Basement | Film Review

When a Los Angeles serial killer (Jackson Davis), tagged the “Gemini killer”, kidnaps a famous and rich musician, trapping him in ‘The Basement‘, the kidnapped (Cayleb Long) must learn to maneuver through all twelve personalities of the killer. Don’t worry, we’ve got some side quests for you as well.

Horror filmmakers have one daunting task at hand, which so few are able to succeed at. “How can I unnerve my audience?” A fair question, and an even more difficult one to attain, as most tend to miss the mark or rely too heavily on ‘jump scares’.

Thankfully, The Basement doesn’t over utilize this, to much relief of the audience. It’s less unnerving to experience turning the corner and having someone pop out, when you could build tension-driven moments instead. We’re given a fairly simple plot, which unravels twists and turns as the story progresses. While the premise sounds promising, and has redeemable moments, it misses the mark pretty drastically on the dialogue. Some may attribute this to the delivery of the lines, but with a low budget independent film and not having veteran actors on board, writers Brian Conley and Sean Decker really needed to expend the time and effort in developing the audible interchange so it comes across naturally. Particularly, when the movie depends heavily on those dialogue-driven scenes for flow and growth.

The movie is not all with fault, though. The drama and tension-building are there and solidified in moments of gore and shock. It is certainly a movie that preys on moments of disgust, which you’ll absolutely find. There were a couple of scenes that genuinely made me go “WHOA,” which is a rarity for me. As a lead, Cayleb Long could have executed some of his scenes better. It’s not to say that he is a poor actor, but that he’d be better suited for a drama. His tears are believable, but his terror was of limited range.

While Mischa Barton is the highest paid credit on the roll, her position in the first two-thirds of the flick is minimal, and she’s out shined by Jackson Davis – one of her co-stars, who she shares very little screen time with. Davis truly shifted between his personalities quite well, even if some of the props were a little cheesy or misplaced. He executed the creep factor, the humanity, and the disgust. As for Barton, it almost seems as though the writers were intending on making her the side quest of the screenplay for the first two acts. But after realizing they paid for her name, decided in the last act that she needed a bit more screen time if they were going to make the most of it.

A story that had promise to it with a decent cast and a solid job from beginning director, Brian M. Conley. In the end, The Basement falters with a script that needed more attention paid to the dialogue. The impact of this truly took the movie from a Split meets Silence of the Lambs–esque comparison, down to the likes of The Room. Entertaining? Sure, I suppose. Successful? Not quite. As a whole, they just can’t seem to get up the stairs.