Baskin

The Eye Gore Sanction

Baskin
Turkey 2013/2015 
Directed by Can Evrenol & Ogulcan Eren Akay 
(Ogulcan co-director on the short 2013 version)
Severin Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: All the spoilers in this one. 

There are two versions of Baskin presented on the Blu Ray edition I watched... the original 2013, 11 minute short written and directed by Can Evrenol & Ogulcan Eren Akay... and the 2015 feature film based on the short, directed by just Evrenol but retaining both of them as writers. Two of the featured cast from the short... Yavuz, played by Muharrem Bayrak and Arda, played by Görkem Kasal, also reprise their roles from the short. And, I have to say that, although the films are a bit different in the way they play out, the short version which I watched first is a lot punchier and more intriguing than the feature length version. 

The short is a bunch of cops in a patrol wagon who get called as backup for ‘something’ happening in a house in the local area. When they get there a dead goat falls onto the roof of the van and when they go in the house there’s lots of human filth, demonic artefacts and two policemen carrying out a suspect. As they delve deeper, they find bizarre people being cut up or in sacks and they are chased back towards the now locked doors of the house while one of the crew just sees a bunch of policemen standing around brainwashed in the basement of the house (which is an idea which is touched on and explored in a much less subtle and ultimately less intriguing way in the feature length version). 

There’s lots of handheld camera in the short and this gives the whole demonic house angle... which is also a lot more atmospheric, I felt, than in the later feature... a quite chaotic feel. It finishes without offering any answers and, yeah, I can see that this short would have done well at various horror festivals (hopefully it played at FrightFest at some point). 

And then there’s the feature length movie. This is an expanded version of the story which has much more fluid camerawork instead of the raw hand held stuff which helped the mood of the first one. The film starts out with a childhood dream that is later revealed to be the dream of one of the policemen and, when we first see the police, they are talking in a cafe about various things such as gambling and how most Turkish men, themselves included, lost their virginity fornicating with animals. No, I’m not making this up.

Ultimately, this is where the film began to lose it for me because, unlike the first film which didn’t have time to get into any character development at all, the cops here are portrayed, in my mind, as just basically thugs who are not nice people and who I could never relate to. I feel this is somewhat of a mistake because, if you have nobody to relate to, you don’t actually care what happens to them and, after encounters with various toads and a person who they hit in their van by accident... but who they can’t find after it happens... they make their way to a much larger house which is said to once have been a police station ‘back in the day’. 

There are various detours along the way as they explore what is a demon cult shrine and find themselves captured and tortured by the cult leader. This includes lots of gory imagery like... well, okay. Here’s a quick check list which is not for those with a weak stomach but which, somehow, completely failed to shock or move me in any way so... yeah, I think the director was definitely doing something wrong here. 

After a cop gets dragged away to be pulled apart and eaten... one cop has his intestines pulled out. Another has his eye stabbed out before the cult leader licks the empty socket. That cop is then forced to have sex with a goat lady (the ultimate fate of the cops is slightly reminiscent of the nasty conversations they were having at the start of the movie) and, after he dies of stress and a tarantula walks out of his mouth for no apparent reason, the said goat lady lays two eggs (the film is full of little surreal touches like this so... yeah, I really don’t know why I didn’t respond more positively to it). A third cop has his throat slit while the cult leader washes his bald head and face in the blood and the fourth of the remaining cops... well, he’s different. He keeps going back into his dreams to the cafe where various manifestations, such as visiting himself in the dream as a kid or being pulled out of the water by a giant hand after the van crash when they hit the person in the road, play out before he reawakens back in the main ‘reality’ of the hell he finds himself in. On one of these dream visits he manages to somehow free himself and stab the cult leader with a key in the forehead before repeatedly bashing his head with a stall.

And then he escapes, half mad and then, when he rushes to meet a cop van coming through the forest... we get exactly the ending I predicted to the film after a certain incident much earlier into the running time, echoing the cyclic nature of the film and the concept that hell is somewhere we all carry around inside us. 

And, yeah... I didn’t get much out of it. It’s very gory, the acting is all fine and it’s really well put together. Visually it looks great and this is usually enough for me to really enjoy a film but, I think the main problem here... and perhaps it’s because there’s no emotional connection to the characters... is that the film, not only isn’t scary but there absolutely no suspense to it at all. In fact, by the time everyone was being tortured I found myself nodding off. I don’t think I’m particularly jaded to the violence and viscera in particular... it just didn’t engage me emotionally with the scenario and I just found it a bit dull, to be honest. The score by Ulas Pakkan is okay (which I listened to a few times on CD a few years ago) and it serves the film well but it’s a case of the film it’s serving not packing the kind of wallop that was necessary for it to really work as well as the short film. At least, that’s how I felt about it. 

In the first Severin Cellar video on You Tube where director Richard Stanley was ‘in the cellar’ (which I believe has been taken down after certain accusations about Stanley emerged), he says this film is a good example of Lovecraftian horror and madness captured on film. I don’t think it is. I mean, sure, it has a couple of the elements (like most horror films) but I think Lovecraft would have been a bit more subtle in his rendition of such themes as are found in this and I really didn’t get that vibe from it. Not that subtlety is the way to go and I certainly enjoy a little screen violence as much as the next fellow (as long as violence doesn’t manifest in real life then it’s fine by me) but I just felt the feature version of Baskin was not particularly maintaining a Lovecraftian atmosphere... or even the atmosphere of the original short if we’re being honest. It does however, look fantastic but, if anything, it feels like the last half an hour of the terrible remake of Suspiria from a few years ago... which really missed the point and felt equally dull in its last act. So, yeah... Baskin the short is maybe worth a look sometime but the feature length version is probably only for those who enjoy gory special effects in their horror films. As for me, I found it a kind of soulless experience, I’m sad to say.