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Don’t Look in the Basement

Director: S.F. Brownrigg Run Time: 89 min. Format: 35mm Rating: R Release Year: 1973

Starring: Bill McGhee, Jessie Lee Fulton, Robert Dracup

March Madness comes to THE DEUCE and – whatever you do – Don’t Look in the Basement!… aka The Forgotten aka The Snake Pit aka Beyond Help aka Death Ward No.13!!! DIY director/off-beat impoverished auteur S.F. Brownrigg’s 1973 tawdry tale of terror set in a scuzzy three-story sanitarium of… INSANITY!

Nubile newbie nurse Charlotte Beale shows up to her new job just after the head doc has been unduly dispatched by one of the dim-wits… and immediately makes waves with newly-in-charge Dr. Geraldine Masters (Anne McAdams) – a master of MEAN! As broken bodies pile up everywhere BUT the basement – the free-wheeling “family” of miscreants crank up their psychoses and let their freak-flags fly high – kleptomania and nymphomania… necrophilia and knife-wielding… paranoia… and popsicles! Archetypes of a failed society acting out in hatred of their miserable lives and the world that made them… moody, morose melodrama… melancholia… madness and murder… A miasma of screaming meemies!!!

A surprisingly strong ensemble cast and a peculiar aura of compassion carry this claustrophobic threadbare thriller to histrionic heights of humanity’s hurts and horrors – the righting of racial wrongs… redemptions and revenge… where wackos wander the halls of Hell!!

Not for THE DEUCE to tell you what to do – but don’t miss DON’T LOOK IN THE BASEMENT! DON’T!! DO NOT!!!

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