Tag Archives: Frank Henenlotter

RECOMMENDED AS WEIRD: BAD BIOLOGY (2008)

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DIRECTED BYFrank Henenlotter

FEATURING: Charlee Danielson, Anthony Sneed, Mark Wilson

PLOT: Mutant genitalia drive their masters to stalk, copulate and kill.

Still from Bad Biology (2008)

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LISTBad Biology is a campy shocker about rogue sexual organs. It’s camp value stems from the director’s willingness to pull out the stops and include any bizarre scenes he deems appropriate, rather than from inferior filmmaking or a desire to make the movie look cheap or corny.

COMMENTSFrank Henenlotter (Basket Case, Brain Damage) finally got a decent budget and made his most delightfully freakish, slick and naughty movie yet. The opening line consists of a mutant girl (his real life girlfriend, the very pretty Danielson) stating, “I was born with seven clits.”

Jennifer is a living sexual anomaly and nymphomaniac perpetually seeking satiation as she struggles to puzzle out her destiny. She mates, gestates and conceives in only a few hours, often inadvertently killing her partner and depositing her malformed, monstrous issue in any convenient waste receptacle. Believing that she is deified by her “gift,” she considers herself to be a genetically advanced Eve.

Batz is a nervous stud with a personified penis that behaves more like an evil conjoined twin than a sexual organ. A side effect of steroid abuse, it has a mind and a will of its own. It is in the habit of detaching itself to embark on its own adventures. To keep it under control, Batz consumes powerful cocktails of animal tranquilizers. This only curtails its wanderings. It still dances in his pants to the beat of its own drummer, literally. Batz’ bat is capable of inducing perpetual (i.e. permanent) multiple orgasms in his, or rather, its dubiously “lucky” partners.

The two sexual mutants, with their latently homicidal sexual super apparatuses, consume a succession of vapid sex partners as they strive to satisfy their own demented appetites—and to control, or perhaps just placate, their throbbing, pulsing, oozing out of control reproductive organs. That is, until they “meat” each other. Bawdy, tawdry, seamy, sordid, ribald and every bit as prurient, squishy, disgusting and hilarious as one could hope, Bad Biology just has to be seen to be fully appreciated.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…more out-of-control than anything the director has done.”–Matthew Sorrento, Film Threat (contemporaneous)

CAPSULE: BASKET CASE (1982)

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Frank Henenlotter

FEATURING: Kevin van Hentenryck, Terri Susan Smith, Beverly Bonner

PLOT: Duane checks into a derelict Times Square hotel carrying a wicker basket under his arm; inside is something about 1/4 the size of a person, that eats about 4 times the hamburgers a person would.

Still from Basket Case (1982)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Most people will go through their entire lives and never see anything as weird as the micro-budgeted cult shocker Basket Case.  A fine little offbeat exploitation shocker, the flick makes a late-in-the-game play for true weirdness with a strange dream sequence that sees Duane running naked through the streets of New York as a prelude to the film’s most shocking development.  To us, however, Basket Case shakes out as nothing more (or less) than a fine example of a unique, campy monster flick with only marginally weird elements.  That’s just how selective we are with our weirdness.

COMMENTS:  One of the secrets to Basket Case‘s success is that it positively oozes indecency and vice, but isn’t mean-spirited or sadistic.  Director Frank Henenlotter nails the aesthetic of sleaze, and for the most part keeps on the right side of the fine line between trash and crass, only crossing over briefly once or twice so that we know where the border is.  You emerge from a screening titillated and pleasantly shocked, but not feeling like you have to take a bath or go to confession.  The setting—the 42nd street red light district as it existed in Times Square in the early 1980s—creates an immediate atmosphere of moral and social decay.  Since renovated and Disneyfied, back then the neon-lit 42nd street was an avenue where you could walk past peep shows and marquees advertising “3 Kung Fu hits!” while being propositioned for weed, heroin and/or whores by strangers.  The scenes Henenlotter shot Continue reading CAPSULE: BASKET CASE (1982)