By anyone’s standards, sixteen years is a hell of a hiatus for a filmmaker to take between films. Yeah, from time to time this happens (Herschell Gordon Lewis went a staggering thirty years between The Gore Gore Girls and his next film) but overall, it’s still unusual. After all, if you’d taken that long a break, would fans still be into your work? Would your stuff still seem current? And would you be able to appeal to new audiences altogether? Well, it seems to me that if Frank Henenlotter gave any consideration to the above questions, he ended up deciding to throw them out altogether, and to make a film so outlandish and, let’s face it, alienating that only the truly dedicated, or else the truly unhinged would still be with him by the end. Hence Bad Biology (2008) starts as it means to go on, opening with the line, “I was born with seven clits…”
Far more sexually explicit than anything else he’s made, Bad Biology follows the fate of a young woman, a photographer called Jennifer (Charlee Danielson, who perhaps understandably isn’t listed as making anything else since on IMDb). Jennifer self-describes as ‘the girl with the crazy pussy’: her oddball body and urges set her at odds with all the normies around her, as much as she still needs them to scratch that itch. Little wonder meaningful relationships aren’t forthcoming though – being with her isn’t exactly a straightforward experience. Every time she has sex, she delivers a part-formed ‘freak baby’ within a couple of hours. Meanwhile, across town, we see a guy who is using a hell of a lot of chemicals to alter his own sexual performance. And not to ‘enhance’ it in a usual sense, either: he’s using farm grade medicines and industrial kit to get himself going. Perhaps inevitably, Jennifer and this troubled young man, Batz, are about to find one another…
No one could deny that Bad Biology is a brash calling-card to leave after sixteen years of peace and quiet. All I’d say is that if the exaggerated dialogue and sequences turn you off, such as a group of teenagers talking at some, err, length about feted American porn star John Holmes (would they know who he was?) then blame yourselves to a degree: the film’s opening line sets the bar, right before lowering it. That said, anyone expecting Henenlotter horror elements would probably be disappointed here, as I honestly was. Barring the mutant offspring theme, which gets only a minimal treatment, and a certain sequence towards the end of the film when Batz’s penis decides to go it alone, this is a film far, far more in the sexploitation vein. I suppose the film’s key nod to the horror material which preceded it is simply in how grotesque its sex scenes actually are. This film certainly isn’t intended as titillation, and it renders every sex scene into something horrible accordingly.
So we have a film which either sets out to shock, or doesn’t care that it does; we have a film which focuses on sex and provides a few moments of body horror, rather than a body horror which touches upon sex. So far, this doesn’t seem to have a great deal in common with earlier Henenlotter films, but there are a few elements which act as a bridge between the earlier films and the new. Fulfilling the more modern aspect, the soundtrack is modern, and New York has become rather gentrified; there’s some CGI in here, which isn’t great to look at. We also have Jennifer breaking the fourth wall, giving us a voiceover in places and addressing the audience directly – which is definitely something new. In other aspects, a lot of the coloured filters look like they’re straight out of the 80s and make the film appear older than it is, and when all’s said and done, Gabe Bartalos’s SFX work is still instantly recognisable. Who else would spend such time and effort on designing a ravening twenty inch monstrosity? I’ll tell you who: the guy who’s done it before.
As for attitudes to women, hmm. I don’t think you’d go to a filmmaker like Henenlotter expecting his work to reflect our modern preoccupations with gender, but those inclined would probably raise an eyebrow here. Lots of men in the film try to police Jennifer’s behaviour, slinging insults at her, acting like they’re the ones in control: it’s only thanks to her unorthodox make-up that she’s able to turn it around. She even turns their ‘little deaths’ (or actual deaths) into photographic essays. Past emotional attachments have ended up going badly wrong for her, so she now steers clear of them; she also shies away from that old adage ‘women have sex to get love’. She definitely doesn’t, and avoids it like the plague. All of that said and done, she does turn into a hysterical, irrational mess on occasion, and other women in the film dodge between being inert sets of boobs, and prostitutes. Honestly, I think it’s only the film’s elective preposterousness that has saved it from a glut of Vice articles about how a disembodied penis breaking into women’s apartments to sleep with them is deeply problematic. But all of its problematic content is just a facet of the film’s overall puerile nature, in my opinion. If women are characterised rather thinly, then so’s everyone else we meet.
Fans had a very long wait for Bad Biology – a title which, come to think of it, neatly sums up the themes we see in Frank Henenlotter’s best-known feature films. And, whilst this film isn’t on a par with his very best, it’s still got moments of pure Henenlotter, which are enjoyable; it’s certainly as ‘exploitation’ as anything he’s ever made, it’s knowingly, achingly trashy and it’s at its best in the end sequences, roaming body parts and all. In fact, the film feels a little like a dumping ground for every batshit insane idea Henenlotter has had since Basket Case 3, so perhaps these could have been developed a bit more, or divided up differently, and due to this ‘throw everything at it’ approach, it doesn’t feel as fully formed as his earlier films. It’s little wonder, if you look at fan reviews, that people are divided on this one. But it’s great that Henenlotter decided to make another film which still has his hallmarks, and as naive as it perhaps sounds, as a director who’s still working today, it would be great if he ever did decide to return to the body horror/exploitation cinema we know and love after another ten year break…