You know a film still has something, however many years pass, when you consider what would happen to it if it was pitched today. So at a guess, and alongside most of the best horror and exploitation films ever made, a film which involves exploding drug addicts and reanimated hookers via bad science would be unlikely to get a pass – at least, not from anyone with a considerable budget or say-so. This is the very basic plot of Frankenhooker (1990), a film which feels like it nicely rounds off Frank Henenlotter’s period of film releases during the 1980s, albeit that Basket Case 3 was still to follow in 1991. I remember seeing the posters and the video box art for Frankenhooker as a kid, though it was a few years before I got to find out what it was all about. In fact, I’m sure I saw this before I ever saw the ‘classic’ Frankenstein movies made by the likes of Universal or Hammer, so it was a matter of some surprise to me that Boris Karloff didn’t ask the angry locals with pitchforks if they ‘wanted a date’.
Although released in 1990, it’s the 80s spirit of enterprise and a ‘can do’ attitude which leads certain leading men to have a go at science, even though they’ve been outright rejected by the scientific or medical establishments. What cares Herbert West that he’s been shunned? He’s going to uncover the secret of life anyway, and then they’ll all be sorry. Likewise, Frankenhooker’s young protagonist Jeffrey Franken (James Lorinz) hasn’t been dissuaded from trying to master the greatest secrets of human life by the mere fact of being thrown out of several medical schools. (By the way, where the hell does he get that human brain/eyeball combo at the start?) In any case, our ‘bio-electro-technician’ gets his big break when a tragic accident befalls his fiancee, Elizabeth (Patty Mullen).
“A tossed human salad”
Jeffrey has modified the lawnmower which they’ve bought for Elizabeth’s father because of course he has, but a problem with his modifications sends it into fatal collision with Elizabeth, who is brutally dismembered. But rather than think, ‘perhaps I’m not great at this,’ Jeffrey decides he can put Elizabeth back together again using his scientific nous. In fact, if he’s going to achieve this, he decides he might as well make some minor improvements. See, Elizabeth was a little on the large side (the film’s only truly implausible special effect is that unconvincing fat suit) and although Jeffrey had made an attempt to staple her stomach (!) it hadn’t worked. Jeffrey does quite a bit of research on this, if that’s what you can call buying a lot of softcore mags and attaching photos of Elizabeth’s face over the girls’ bodies, but in the end he does what anyone would do: gathers a group of prostitutes for a ‘special party’, where he will choose the nicest bodies ready for Elizabeth v.1.1. This isn’t without precedent, by the way; Victor Frankenstein also scavenges body parts which he considers are aesthetically-pleasing, so Jeffrey Franken is in solid, literary company here. That Jeffrey reaches this conclusion after drilling holes in his own head is neither here nor there. But how will he harvest the body parts he needs?
By adulterating crack cocaine, of course. Once inhaled, it will cause the women to explode. He knows this because he practices on a guinea pig. Although he has a moment of conscience which almost prevents this from happening, gladly it does happen, in one of the most absurd, brilliantly excessive sequences ever filmed. Oh Frank Henenlotter, how we love you for it. But actually getting the parts is only the beginning. Jeffrey next has to assemble them, do the obligatory lightning reanimation thing (as much as a staple of Frankenstein movies as the monster itself) and then hope against hope that his deceased fiancee is mentally coherent and even grateful that he’s rebuilt her out of a panoply of prostitutes’ limbs, all selected because he likes them better than her own! What woman wouldn’t be charmed and flattered, I ask you?
“If they don’t wanna do it they can…just say no!”
Well, more anon. But the new Elizabeth’s first instinct is linked to her new body parts and not her brain. She follows a kind of homing instinct back to Times Square, where she regurgitates words spoken by all of the women who donated her new limbs. This soon brings her to the attention of the girls’ pimp Zorro (Henenlotter regular Joseph Gonzalez) who has been raging over their loss, and wants to find the mysterious ‘Jersey boy’ who somehow blew them up. As Jeffrey desperately tries to steer Elizabeth back home, he has to throw himself into Zorro’s path once more.
Patty Mullen – once a Penthouse Pet – is outrageously good as the modded Elizabeth, lurching and gurning her way through New York to great comedic effect. The re-use of the script in compromising situations is also great in terms of the comedy of errors aspects, and let’s face it – the purple-clad, stitched-up form of Elizabeth has become a modern horror classic image, thanks to a keen eye for a good look as well as Mullen’s fun performance, which only appears at around the hour mark in any case. Good horror monsters don’t need a lot of screen time, they just make the most of it while they’re there. We should give James Lorinz plenty of credit for his performance too, though, as he carries a great deal of the film via his (deadpan) monologue, as well as looking genuinely put upon, albeit by his own crummy decisions. The crux of the film is Jeffrey desperately trying – and failing – to control a series of increasingly bizarre situations. And it’s when Elizabeth recovers her sense of self that he’s really in trouble…
“What I did may have been a bit unorthodox…”
The denouement in this film is essentially a delicious bit of body horror payback; Jeffrey has after all devoted his efforts to an ‘oestrogen-based serum’, which can only be used to resurrect women, so when his head is sadly and brutally detached from his body, he can only be brought back with a woman’s body. Or, bodies, Calling Dr. Freud: it seems that the guy who was hellbent on choosing the sexiest body parts was happiest looking at them from more of a distance, and bemoans his new lack of his ‘johnson’ once Elizabeth has given him a taste of his own medicine. Oh, my. Well, thanks to the easily-understood blueprints and the stock of component parts, as well as a girlfriend who returns the favour, he and Elizabeth can be together again at the end of the film. In what sort of way, ours not to reason why, but there’s a moral of sorts to this tale.
For a film about a hybrid undead prostitute running amok on New York’s streets, and for all that it had an exceptionally modest box office reception, Frankenhooker seems like Henenlotter’s most accessible film of the bunch. Hear me out: regardless of the subject matter, it doesn’t feel quite as skeezy as Basket Case or Brain Damage, despite sharing a lot of shooting locations and being made within a few short years. The NY streets are still sleazy but brighter, less oppressive-feeling somehow, and besides the film veers between there and the leafy suburbia over the bridge, as well as feeling a lot more modern with its TV talk show skits and the Never Say No song, which pokes fun at a lot of late 80s social anxieties. With the exception of what I’ll refer to as the ‘fridge scene’, the body horror is less grotesque here, too; Elizabeth has a few stitches, but otherwise she certainly doesn’t look as grim or warped as Belial or Elmer. It’s also a rather bloodless film, even oddly so, thanks to the novel limb-gathering technology Jeffrey deploys – which cauterises the wounds rather well. The horror overall is overshadowed by what creeps into soft-core territory in places, perhaps giving us a peek at the kind of horror/exploitation ratio Henenlotter most prefers. All in all, Frankenhooker keeps things cartoonish, and never quite as dark as either Basket Case or Brain Damage. It’s very much its own beast with its own laugh-out-loud atmosphere and outlandish, fleshly excess, and it’s yet another enjoyable foray into a world where bodily integrity spoils the fun.
Anthology films – often three short tales with a common framework – are nothing new, even if the format isn’t used all that often today. We have, however, seen some interesting variations on the anthology film in recent years, perhaps most notably with The ABCs of Death in 2012, which made a minor stir and spawned a second edition. Certainly, what this anthology showed was that there’s acres of potential in the idea that a film can comprise several shorter chapters, whether or not these chapters are linked in the way that, say, the old Amicus portmanteau films were. As we know, sometimes a film’s cardinal sin is overstaying its welcome, or stretching a meagre idea over ninety minutes. Short filmmakers can’t get away with that. So, I was very optimistic when I came to watch Blood Clots, an anthology film which has taken the unusual step of compiling seven horror tales. Whilst the stories themselves aren’t linked, what they have in common is a punchy, decisively entertaining approach and enough variety to please any number of viewers.
Time to Eat is next, a short, sweet spin on the ‘something in the basement’ idea, followed by Still, which is a genius idea whereby a street performer – you know, the guys who stand stock still in city centres for the edification of tourists – is stuck, rooted to the spot during an incredibly gory zombie outbreak. We’re treated to his internal monologue as all of this unfolds, and this is a film both very camp and very slick in its delivery. Hellyfish has a daft central idea worthy of SyFy, as the unlikely couple of a Russian femme fatale and an Iranian jihadist look for a missing H-bomb off the coast of the US. We all know what ‘nuclear’ means where there’s any manner of ecosystem around, so before long this goofy skit on ‘B’ movies old and new winds up terrorising the beach with…well, nothing more needs to be said, I’m sure.
If you freeze-frame in the opening reels of Basket Case 2, a curious thing happens. You can almost – almost – sense the utter surprise on Frank Henenlotter’s part that he’s making a sequel to his surprise grindhouse hit at all.
Made in the same year as the uproarious Frankenhooker, Basket Case 2 feels like a perfect blend between opportunism and kicking back – grabbing the chance to make a sequel while the going’s good, but not labouring under any illusions either. Henenlotter is clearly in a mind to go to town on the special effects here, with the result that the film feels to be around 60% latex, and there’s a whole host of new characters being given screen time. Eerily, Belial looks a hell of a lot more like Kevin Van Hentenryck in this incarnation, which somehow makes him look even nastier, even though Van Hentenryck himself has a perfectly amiable face: that lends itself very well to the whole good twin/bad twin thing. In terms of subject matter, things feel a lot more jokey overall in Basket Case 2, but there are still characteristically grim moments. This isn’t a simple moral high ground thing where the poor put-upon ‘freaks’ are mistreated; they aren’t terribly nice to outsiders either, maintaining what seems to be an unspoken Henenlotter mantra: “most people are assholes”, whether or not they have the conventional two arms, two legs, one head.
Basket Case 3: The Progeny was made the following year, and wrapped within a month. Being made so close to the last film, it hardly needs the lengthy flashback which harks back to BC2, but what this does make clear is that the memorable sex scene sequence isn’t forgotten yet; it’s going somewhere. We find out that Eve (Belial’s girlfriend) is in the family way, no one’s quite sure what her birth will entail, and Duane has meanwhile been locked in a padded cell for trying to re-attach his brother. These are, by the way, not words you’d ordinarily find yourself typing.
Each successive Basket Case film seems to reach a little higher, from an already lunatic premise, to new heights of creature FX and bizarre ways for these FX to get invoked. For instance, the birth sequence in BC3 is a fun exercise in excess, throwing in catchphrases like “ovarian ovation”, then matching this with a dream sequence for Belial (reprised after the end credits). The last visit to the world of Belial and Duane shows them not as outsiders, railing against the world, but somewhat bewildered members of an extended family group, dealing with family issues. In this respect, BC3 couldn’t be more different to BC; the fact that all of the planned gore was more or less excised from BC3 at the request of the producers further alters the film’s tone, making it generally more playful and allowing it to give the odd nod to other films (the ‘mad inventor’ shtick had just done a turn in Frankenhooker; Belial’s contraption also looks a little like a certain scene in Aliens, though perhaps that’s just me, going a little mad here?)
When I heard that Mara was a horror story invoking sleep paralysis as a key element of its plot, as a sufferer I was immediately interested. Sleep paralysis is well understood in the modern age, just as sleep and dreams are generally, but anyone who has ever had a significant nightmare, or a waking nightmare will know that reason and rationality are furthest from your mind when undergoing this kind of terror; therefore, these experiences remain ripe for solid on-screen explorations, offering lots of potential. Happily, director Clive Tonge and writer Jonathan Frank have shown themselves more than up to that task in Mara, a film which weaves a mythology around sleep paralysis, but balances this against far more grounded and mundane preoccupations which trouble people in their sleep.
Something else which is very interesting in this film comes via another of its core plot developments – that Matthew Wynsfield somehow puts himself in danger by seeking help for his sleep paralysis issues. Rather than that vague modern panacea of ‘support’ ridding people of their problems, here in the form of a support group, in Mara it exposes people to more harm. In effect, a potential cure, one we believe in on an almost religious scale today, lays people bare to a threat, which itself stems from an innovative blend of folklore, the supernatural, and something between a good old-fashioned curse and psychological breakdown. It’s pessimistic in the extreme, and it’s handled with genuine ingenuity here.
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…”
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.
If you didn’t already know from your experience of watching Basket Case that bad things are almost certainly around the corner, then you could be forgiven for thinking that the beginning of Brain Damage (1988) features a perfectly respectable elderly couple, in a well-decorated New York apartment, doing something perfectly reasonable. Sure they’re feeding…something, but that’s probably a lhasa apso or something. Dogs eat anything, so they’d surely eat, umm, brains… from an ornate china plate…erm…in the tub…pets, eh?
It hardly needs saying that Brain Damage could work as a hideous metaphor for addiction. The highs, the lows, the people hurt, the desperate measures – they’re all in there. In fact the film seems to invite us to see Brian in this light on several occasions: as he prepares to head into the new wave gig where he meets the unfortunate fellatio brain-munch girl, for instance, there’s a back-and-forth shot of him getting his hit with an alcoholic down-and-out standing just a little way away, drinking from a brown paper bottle. Their ages are different and the substances are different, but these are both people with their dependencies.
As much as I love all of Henenlotter’s films, Brain Damage is really my favourite. On a low budget, and with inexperienced actors (this was Rick Hearst’s first film) it achieves a great deal, striking a good balance between authentic horror and horror-comedy. It has a lot of the gritty, grimy nastiness of Basket Case, with the same mean streets and locations, content so graphic that it was excised from early cuts of the film, and horrible subject matter: in some respects it’s like Basket Case in reverse, with an unwitting joining-together of two sentient creatures, one ‘normal’ and one not, instead of an enforced coming-apart. So this whole symbiosis theme is pretty grim, and gives us some unpleasant scenes throughout.
A few years ago, at the Dead by Dawn horror festival in Edinburgh, I was invited to take part in a ‘play dead’ competition with the rest of the auditorium. Quite unusual as a pastime, you might think, even for a horror fest.
Henenlotter has not made a vast array of features during his career, though via his work with Something Weird he’s shown he’s as happy to save other people’s films from oblivion as he is to make his own. Altogether, he’s made eight original films, together with some documentary work, and at the time of writing his name is attached to a couple more shorts. Some directors crank out a film a year, but Henenlotter has never joined their ranks; there’s even been a sixteen-year hiatus between features. None of that means the impact of his work has been any less, and in a few very notable films in the 80s and 90s in particular, he’s made his name as a director of ‘body horror’, where the physical body can be invaded, mutated, updated and quite open blown apart by a whole host of bizarre phenomena. Some body horror is genuinely unsettling: close contemporary David Cronenberg, for instance, renders his compromised bodies the stuff of nightmares. It’s horrific, yes, but sublime. Henenlotter has a different approach – he opts to go straight from the sublime to the ridiculous. Sure, you can wince at some of the things he does on screen, but any deeper considerations are usually grabbed out of your hands by the next scene coming, which does something so hideously outlandish that all you can do is laugh. It is, as he suggests, pure exploitation, and it’s terrific entertainment, as well as immensely formative for many of us of a certain age, who grew up with these films on VHS and later, DVD.
Winter, upstate New York. The Russell family are on vacation, but their vehicle has broken down in the snow. As father John (George C. Scott) crosses the road to call for help, an out-of-control truck careers towards his wife and daughter. A simple and effective cut to John, alone and back in the city, tells the audience all it needs to know; it’s the first understated moment of the film which shows that director Peter Medak trusts us to understand what’s going on without spelling everything out for us. The family home is now boxed up, with only flashbacks to show us what it once was.
Everything is handled with a sensitive pace, allowing characterisation to blossom without having Russell say everything he’s thinking; slowly and surely, he picks his way through a story which effectively leads him/us down a few blind alleys, arriving at its surprising denouement cautiously. I’d also argue that in the best supernatural horrors, the haunted place – usually a house – seems to operate as a character in its own right. Before we can safely attribute phenomena to a specific entity, we can only interpret the strangeness of the haunted place itself. It is the source of the phenomena, so it needs to seem almost sentient, as well as striking in aesthetics and atmosphere. The house in The Changeling has all of this in abundance, too. Camera angles are shot from the house’s perspective, and it’s described by Russell himself as having wants and preferences. Again, it’s simple stuff I suppose, but done well it’s very effective. The film does more, too, by linking its supernatural to real-life events, which calls up far older ideas that ‘justice will out’ to a very modern tale of corruption.
How much can one ninety-minute film reasonably do within its timeframe? Can a film successfully go from awkward laughs to gore, from femmes fatales to OTT-ultraviolence, and from slacker humour to shock? Rondo (2018) believes it’s not only possible, it’s all part and parcel of its overall appeal. Both the ethos and the resulting movie have a few little drawbacks, but overall, I’d say those behind the film manage to balance these things pretty well. Due to its content this will not be a film for everyone, but if you can laugh and squirm at the same time, you might well be okay with this one.
If they weren’t already on your radar, it’s at about this point that the film’s black comedy elements begin to rise. As Paul and some of the other gatherers listen to the ‘rules of the road’ for this party, the script modulates between comedic and downright sleazy; if the film showed half the things it describes, it’d have an X rating, which makes the steady delivery of certain lines by the host, Lurdell (Reggie De Morton) seem all the more uneasily funny. Paul’s suspicions about this place and this set-up are ultimately – and quickly – confirmed, so he decides to disappear. But he can’t just do that, or put this strange night behind him. It’s not as simple as that.
Umberto Lenzi turned his hand to many different kinds of genre film during his career, so it’s perhaps little surprise that he looked to the kind of cannibalism movies being made by his peers (such Ruggero Deodato), making two of them in very rapid succession, after almost a ten-year break between these and the first of his films to nod towards anthropophagy, The Man from the Deep River. Cannibal Ferox and Eaten Alive were made within a year of each other, though I’d suggest that Ferox is still the better-known title of the two, often for some of its more notorious scenes, and perhaps still for its association with the ‘video nasty’ debacle, which has so often led to a long legacy of different cuts and titles.
In many respects Ferox is a sort-of morality tale, whereby every white person setting foot in the Amazon basin is an irredeemable fool, nasty beyond measure, and so they get served accordingly. Even Gloria eventually fathoms this, bless. However, they don’t simply get picked off in order of awfulness, with some of the better-meaning characters dying way before the worst of them, so it’s not as straightforward as it might be. It’s also worth knowing with these cannibal horrors that a lot of the more notorious and gory scenes are often crammed into a short amount of time, usually towards the end of the ninety minutes: they certainly are here, and in common with 
Given some of the films which have showcased Eastern European locations for American audiences in recent years, you’d be forgiven for thinking that in every disused industrial building in this part of the world, there’s some sort of dodgy sex-and-torment club holding sway. Such is the case in Dark Crimes (2016), which crams quite a lot of breasts and torture into its opening scenes; this scene actually takes place outside of the timeframe of the rest of the film and as such is a little confusing, but quite possibly it seemed a shame not to add it in. These considerations aside, Dark Crimes is probably most noteworthy for its casting of Jim Carrey in the lead role – though it’s languished a while, two years in fact, waiting for a release, which seems surprising given his bankability. Well, having now watched the film in its entirety, let’s just say I’m rather less surprised that it’s been left sitting on a shelf somewhere.
As for Carrey, I suppose you could say this is a change of pace for him – but then again, he’s already proven he can do serious acting elsewhere. Once the initial mild surprise of seeing him looking so dour wears off, you realise he’s being given very little to do here; that dour stare is the whole role. He also veers between a neutral accent (better) and an attempt at an Eastern European one (worse), which just makes it doubly silly. (It’s never really explained why the whole of Poland is conducting its affairs exclusively in English, right down to the TV news. Only the names are Polish in this version of Poland.) Charlotte Gainsbourg has a role here, too, one which grows in importance as the film moves forward, but she essentially reprises the role she’s done several times elsewhere, with a completely unsurprising nude scene/sex scene and a strung-out demeanour overall. To be fair, she isn’t permitted any characterisation for most of the film, so it’s all too little, too late when it finally comes along.