How far does the grungy spirit of 80s horror reach? There’s an argument to be made for retro-conscious thrillers like The Guest or It Follows slumping over their synthesisers and going great lengths to resurrect the straight-forward thrills of years past in a cool new chasis’s. Yet the spit and sawdust of the grindhouse theatres has been mopped up and swept away in most circles, leaving it to the few remaining stalwarts of the era to remind us why these junkie classics were so deliciously scuzzy in the first place. Frank Henenlotter is one of those unreformed madmen who didn’t calm down once, with six goofball stories so rancid that their stench is still felt from beneath old video rental stores to this day. 2008 saw him shoot his last fiction feature (he has since turned his hand to documentary-making), Bad Biology, a true-blue flying of the freak flag that reaches heights of vulgarity that few have reached before…or since.
It’s a classic rom-com set-up: woman can’t seem to find the right man, man is too shy to venture out and find the right woman. How ever will they find love? Henenlotter’s answer involves hideously malformed genitalia from both parties, with erotic photographer Jennifer (a very game Charlee Danielson) nurturing a dangerously overactive sex drive and reproductive system and junkie loner Batz (Anthony Sneed, bearing nothing close to vanity) struggling with an overmedicated, previously-severed member that has grown a mind of its own. Along the way, they’ll both be unlucky in love, but through the gravitational pull of one another’s monstrous nethers, they’ll be drawn into orbit with tragic (yet maybe beautiful?) results.
Make no mistake: Bad Biology is cheap, nasty and demented fare. For many reading this review, that is undoubtedly catnip, and if one can get on its highwire wavelength early on, then there’s still plenty of surprises to be found as Henenlotter defiantly eschews expectation. Those familiar with his hot run in the 80s and early 90s will see traces of Basket Case and Brain Damage’s living appendage anti-heroes and Frankenhooker’s gaudy yet sneakily progressive sexual politics, and on paper, indeed this is the case. What is unexpected, however, is that Henenlotter seems to be less interested in the deft constructs he refined with the Basket Case sequels and Frankenhooker’s sublimely ludicrous sequence of events, and more in simply drinking in the scummy atmosphere found most often in the cinema of Abel Ferrara. Double-billing Bad Biology with The Driller Killer or Ms .45 would be a night of premium-tier exploitation with its finger on the generic pulse, with Bad Biology in particular capturing a very specific time period just far away enough to be slightly nostalgic about. The mid-noughties fashion and make-up is hideous, and its use of early digital technology to capture explicit content is almost quaint in its adolescent excitement.
There’s a bravery in her delivery throughout, knowing how wooden the dialogue sounds but bringing everything to each syllable and completely convincing as a trash-cinema anti-heroine for the ages.
It’s that irresponsible energy that propels Bad Biology forward into a truly memorable piece of filth, laying the groundwork for more modern street-level filmmakers like the Safdie Brothers (their friend and casting director Eleonore Hendricks turns up in a glorious non-sequiter cameo as ‘Crackwhore’) to blaze their trails anew in the derelict buildings of NYC. Other work that comes to mind is Stuart Gordon’s late-period King of the Ants, another reprehensible ride through the battered psyche of a scumbag reborn from grit and grime. A highbrow reading of the film (and especially its quasi-religious finale) could see it as a gloriously impolite reimagining of Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession. Yet for all the off-brand performance-enhancing supplements Henenlotter’s latest brings to the boudoir, it holds no less disgusting water than any of his previous films, often very funny while daring to go places that very few others would.
On the performance front, it’s a genuine shame Charlee Danielson has yet to act again. Her Jennifer holds the exposition rudder, guiding the viewer through a tragically hilarious sexual history while committing violent crimes of passion throughout. At one point, she directly speaks for Henenlotter and co-writer (and rapper) R.A. ‘The Rugged Man’ Thorburn, telling the audience to ignore the wailing mutant baby she’s shot out into a mouldy bathtub not two hours after a heavy night on the tiles, simply because the gestation period was too short to qualify it as human. There’s a bravery in her delivery throughout, knowing how wooden the dialogue sounds but bringing everything to each syllable and completely convincing as a trash-cinema anti-heroine for the ages. Anthony Sneed’s Batz has a somehow even-harder role, having to play schizophrenic paranoia completely straight as he argues with his undersexed pants-python and generally repels everyone around him. He’s maybe less successful than Danielson at capturing the insane tone of the wider film, but hats off to him all the same for taking such a massive swing.
Severin’s new blu-ray release is a bad miracle (“they got a word for that?”) with a stunning 4K restoration that captures every bead of sweat or patch of discoloured rubber from the sparingly-used practical effects. Packed with passionate commentaries and a short film from Sneed in the director’s chair, it’s a fitting bookend to any collection that now has the entire works of Henenlotter’s fiction film career dirtying up a shelf. And as Bad Biology enters its new era of rediscovery from cult film fans (alongside an upcoming UHD disc of Basket Case from Arrow in April), one could hope the outcry could coax Henenlotter out of feature film retirement and back to the subversive, slimy and sexually-depraved cinema missing from today’s climate.
Bad Biology is out on Severin Films Blu-Ray
Simon’s Archive – Bad Biology
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