DIRECTED BY: Can Evrenol

FEATURING: Gorken Kasal, Ergun Kuyucu, Mehmet Cerrahoglu, and Muharrem Bayrak

PLOT: A team of five police officers is called to provide backup at an abandoned building in Inceagac, a locale of some occult notoriety; things go badly pretty quickly for the officers as they travel deeper into the film’s ominous backdrop.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: In an earlier age it could have been considered among the finest “B-horror” movies to grace the midnight movie scene during the ’80s through early ’90s, but as it stands, Baskin’s competent execution is marred by the tale’s derivative and meandering nature. Some token shocks do their job nicely, but the “film twist” advertises itself far too blatantly and doesn’t come off so much as, “Didn’t see that coming, did ya?” as it does, “Hey, check out what I’m doing!”

COMMENTS: Baskin starts out with a mountain of promise that it proceeds to dynamite away, taking the occasional break from destruction to rebuild the edifice. The movie starts with a flashback to the childhood of Arda (Gorkem Kasal), the main character, and so the temporal jumps begin. After some creepy behavior and a few screams and shouts, off we go to “now”, where a convivial conversation between fellow-officers contrasts with a restaurant seemingly assembled from bits cast off from Planet Terror‘s BBQ joint. Five cops: the esteemed leader, the arrogant chatterbox, the calm friend, the rookie, and the one with a migraine. After menacing the son of the restaurant’s owner (and seeing an ominous frog in the men’s room), the gang stumbles out to continue its patrol.

Much to its credit, Baskin does a lot of things right. The main fellows are easily distinguishable from one another (even when having to rely on subtitles), each of them is interesting, and the rapport struck on screen seems truly genuine; it’s apparent these policemen have worked with each other for a while. The sound design, too, adds to the realism. The dialogue always comes from the right place, and once the element of the macabre is snuck in, the various squelches, squidges, and scrapings all work to nice effect. The set piece of an abandoned Ottoman-era police barracks, too, is a perfect choice. The jump cuts convey an appropriate initial shock as well as add to a growing sense of dread. I had such high hopes.

Unfortunately, the movie falls apart by trying to do two things at once — and through this effort, succeeds at neither. Firstly, the “horror” element. Having already listed the merits above, it pains me to mention the failings. As events shuffle from the restaurant to the squad car to the crash before the evil building, things proceed apace well enough. Sure, there’s no need for the swarms of little frogs that litter the movie, and indeed the gypsy-style family by the barracks in utterly unnecessary—but, live and let live. It is when the crew descends the depths that this pastiche of classic horror collides badly with the “clever” thing the film tries to accomplish… the main impact of which I shall leave to the more adventurous reader to investigate. I will hint, though, that it’s the kind of thing I’ve only seen done well by Alain Resnais, who was obliged to be counted among cinema’s greatest directors in order to handle his jumps correctly.

But enough cryptic ramblings. Baskin tries very hard, but comes up short. When you have a shocking horror picture, it certainly helps that your characters are great to watch interacting with one another, but that means you compromise your core asset when you begin killing them off. The 11-minute short film that the feature-length grew from, though, was a delight. Comparable setup, though (obviously) less fleshed out. However, whereas the original short managed to quickly establish and maintain a very unsettling mood, the director’s reach clearly exceeded his grasp when he tacked on another 80 minutes of movie. Still, Baskin was Evrenol’s first full-length attempt. I would certainly be willing to give his sophomore effort a try.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A heady blend of Ambrose Bierce and Herk Hervey, of Lucio Fulci and David Lynch, and of Nicolas Winding Refn and Dario Argento (these last two channeled through director of photography Alp Korfali’s hyperreal lighting), Baskin is an astonishingly assured debut. Driven offroad by Ulas Pakkan’s unnerving ’80s synth score, it is a surreal, uncompromising, bestial and eerily beautiful descent into a hell of self-knowledge, whose precise entry and exit points remain difficult to determine.”–Anton Bitel, TheHorrorShow.TV (festival screening)