A waste of 90 minutes of my life

It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Young man is tortured with a 9 volt battery by mother as a kid and turns into a killer only during thunderstorms.If you buy into that premise, you might also like the bad acting, horrible script, the dead victims whose eyes are literally blinking and moving on screen, and storms without rain.I didn't.Characters actions simply don't make sense. Not sure if you've ever licked a 9 volt battery. I have. It doesn't hurt in the slightest. You feel a dull tingle. That's how we'd test to see if they were good as kids. None of us turned into serial killers.And why do so many of the corpses move when they're supposed to be dead? Didn't anyone see this during the editing? IMDD says this movie had a million dollar budget. Where did the money go?

A serial killer, nicknamed Basement Jack because of his penchant for hiding out in his victim's basements before killing them, is released and returns to the small town of Downer's Grove to continue his massacre and finish off the one victim who was able to escape is slaughter years before.This film desperately tries to be a throwback to 80's slasher films, but it is too slow-paced and padded with the killer's backstory that it commits the worst crime a slasher film can: it becomes boring. The pace does pick up in the end and there are some ambitious attempts at heavy gore; however, it is extremely fake looking and some is obviously CGI. However, the director is able to create some nice atmosphere is spots and, despite the fake looking gore, the film looks great. In the end, though, this is nothing you haven't seen before and it has been done much, much better.FrightMeter Grade: D+

Basement Jack starts eleven years ago as tormented teenager John Reily (producer Eric Peter-Kaiser) goes nuts & kills several families including the boyfriend, mother, father & brother of Karen Cook (Michele Morrow) who manages to survive the brutal attack. Reily is caught but since he was underage he only spent ten years in prison & now he is free, free to hunt Karen down across the US & see to unfinished business from ten years previous by finally killing her. However Karen survived Reily's attempts to kill her once & she is determined to do so again & teams up with small town rookie cop Chris Watts (Sam Skoryna) to put an end to Reily's killing & finally lay some ghost's to rest...Co-produced & directed by Michael Shelton this is pretty much your average teen slasher that is slightly more competently made than usual but otherwise does nothing to distinguish itself from an over-crowed & limited sub-genre that the likes of Halloween & Friday the 13th (original's or remakes) & their numerous sequels & rip-offs have all sewn up already. There's nothing new or original here, a child who is abused by his mother grow's up & starts killing families (if he only killed entire families why did he kill those cops at the station?) for no apparent reason other than that & for some reason he has to do it during a thunder storm which is mentioned a few times but seems utterly pointless. The pace is slow, that character's are stupid (if you opened the door to a serial killer who had been on the telly would you just stand there waiting for him to kill you?) & forgettable (yet another teen with a troubled past, the clichéd good hearted cop who has a craggy old boss) while the kills are the one area where Basement Jack should stand-out but it doesn't as just about every one is the same as Basement Jack kills everyone with his big knife, if your making a slasher film & can't even put any effort or creativity into the kills then you know your making films in the wrong genre. The killer himself was a missed opportunity, he is very bland & in fact doesn't say a single word during the entire film as he just walks around looking like a goth reject with hair hanging down over his face.There's a bit of gore here but the kills are very samey with various stabbings, an arm is cut off & the tops of two cops heads are clichéd off too complete with bad CGI computer effects. As one would expect there's the obligatory final confrontation between Karen & the killer with expected results & a really bad ending which uses the old 'he wasn't dead even though he was' trick to leave things open for a sequel. There are a lot of thunder storms in Basement Jack but there's never any rain (probably due to budgetary reasons), now I don't know if in reality it's possible to have a thunder storm without rain & maybe it is but it just looks strange, it doesn't feel as atmospheric & is just odd (also why is the thunder always as loud inside as it is outside?).With a supposed budget of about $1,000,000 this is quite well made but is as forgettable a teen slasher as you will ever likely see. The cast are OK but no-one stands out particularly.Basement Jack is a standard teen slasher made to cash in on the other countless teen slashers out there but with a dull bad guy, forgettable kills & an instantly forgettable plot there are definitely better examples of the genre out there.

Let me start off by saying this movie is not the best movie out there by any means. Its story is interesting at best and it really tries to make the killer have a personage and back story, so that you do not just see him as another murderer. On the other hand the actor playing Jack does a horrible job. To illustrate how horrible I thought his performance was, I will describe it this way: Every time I saw him on screen I wanted to gouge out my eyes with a spoon and jam chopsticks into my ears to pierce my brain so I would no longer have to see or hear anything he does ever again.If it were up to me I would run him out of town and never let him work again. Over the top? Maybe. You be the judge. It seems the only godsend of this movie was Michelle Morrow the actress playing Karen Cook. In my opinion, in these types of movies the killer should outperform the others in the sense of acting skills, but the exact opposite was the case. She was the star of the film hands down and the others are forgettable.The only reason to see this movie is to get a chuckle out of the acting. It is a rent at best.