Frank Henenlotter

  • Basket Case 2 (1990)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, September 2021) I approached the first Basket Case as a slasher horror film and was surprised to find that it was much weirder than that, with a final revelation taking the film into body horror. By the time I sat down to watch the sequel, I had figured out in-between Frankenhooker and Bad Biology that writer-director Frank Henenlotter was after outrageous fare. Basket Case 2 clearly shows that trajectory when measured against its prequel: it’s weirder, funnier, slicker, and gorier. It multiplies the deformed freaks (paying homage to the 1930s film along the way) in landing the protagonists of the first film into an environment where they are welcomed, and then have to defend it from the outside. It’s honestly not that great of a film, but it’s quirky and outrageous in the fun way that happens when horror fans let loose for their own enjoyment. Basket Case 2 feels a bit scattered at times, with makeup effects taking precedence over the story. I’m not sure I’ll rush to see it again, but it’s not that bad—especially if you’re up to what Henenlotter is going for.

  • Bad Biology (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, August 2021) There are times when I wonder if I’ve become too jaded and seen too many movies. (Especially after shrugging off a gory but dull horror film.) But then there’s something like Bad Biology to remind me that, no, I’m just jaded enough to sit through stuff like that. Because Bad Biology, from noted cult shlockmeister Frank Henenlotter, is clearly designed to upset viewers. Its first few minutes, after all, don’t just feature an abnormally libidinous young woman (with seven, ahem, pleasure centres) who has one-night stands violent enough to kill her partners, but has a biology so outlandish that every tryst is followed hours later by the birthing of a deformed fetus. All of it graphically portrayed. It’s not just that kind of film — it’s the kind of film where the protagonist directly turns to the camera and tells viewers to deal with it or stop watching. And there’s more to come, as the film then turns its attention to a tortured young man with a disembodied phallus who’s just as sex-obsessed as the female lead we just met. They don’t know each other yet, but clearly the intent of Bad Biology is to deliver a twisted love story of extreme characters. But it’s also a film in which the third act features a sentient, autonomous male organ smashing through walls in order to assault young women. Clearly birthed from the gore-comedy school of horror, Bad Biology is utterly tasteless, absolutely not to be seen by mainstream audiences and… actually rather entertaining in a what-will-they-think-of-next kind of way. Charlee Danielson and Anthony Sneed are frankly fearless in their portrayal of the lead couple, and that’s exactly the kind of go-for-broke tone that’s appropriate if the film is to work. Ironically, I may actually be too jaded by everything, because my main complaint about the film is that it could have gone further and covered up some of the second-third lulls with more outlandish material. But keep in mind that, even if I didn’t completely hate Bad Biology, I have no intention of every recommending the film… or seeing it a second time.

  • Basket Case (1982)

    Basket Case (1982)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, March 2021) As much as I dislike slasher movies with knife-wielding antagonists, it doesn’t take all that much improvement over the basic formula for me to give at least a nod of recognition at the ambition. Basket Case, for instance, is at its core a formula slasher — it does have a serial killer running around, it has victims falling dead every fifteen minutes or so, and it has the dark gritty aesthetics characteristic of the genre at the time. But it goes go farther and crazier — the prime example being what’s in the basket that the protagonist lugs around: his deformed conjoined twin, featuring delightfully twisted special effects once it starts killing people. That’s an unusual relationship all right, and it’s bolstered by an unusually strong sense of atmosphere as the characters lurk down the mean streets of early-1980s Manhattan. Basket Case is not, to be clear, a particularly good or likable horror film — it’s low-budget, gory and often unpleasant. But writer-director Frank Henenlotter does distinguish himself in a genre when it’s all too frequent for films to be both repellent and forgettable.

  • Frankenhooker (1990)

    Frankenhooker (1990)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) This. This is what B-movies should be about: grotesque, raunchy, offensive, funny, audacious, goofy and not for everyone. Frankenhooker, as the title suggests, is a riff on Frankenstein (or maybe The Brain That Wouldn’t Die) as an amateur scientist goes the stitched body-parts route to revive his dead girlfriend. In the hands of writer-director Frank Henenlotter (famous for Basket Case), the result is a bizarre mixture of horror, comedy, nudity and dismembered body parts. It’s not made for mainstream audiences: Frankenhooker is deliberately aimed at the EC-comic sensibilities of horror fans who can take a gory joke and revel in the sickness of it. (By the time the protagonist’s “super-crack” makes prostitutes explode, well… even the bad special effects are part of the fun, as the actresses are switched with obvious mannequins that then explode.) While James Lorinz headlines the film as the nerdy scientist, I was more interested in seeing Heather Hunter in a small role. It’s all capped off by a dark ironic joke that claws back much of the film’s over-the-top misogyny. While I’m not sure that I would have been as charmed by Frankenhooker before becoming a jaded horror viewer, I found it all very funny—one of those wonderfully perverse, absolutely reprehensible films that are nonetheless about as far as it’s possible to go in that vein while remaining fun rather than gross. The 1980s were big on those films (there’s a heavy streak of Re-Animator energy here) and it’s a shame that we haven’t seen anything quite like this in the years since then. But, at least, we’ll always have Frankenhooker…