Anyway, today's Night of Terror is from fellow ghoul Chip (who has a pretty cool blog here, and he's written a bit about director Frank Henenlotter. I've only seen one of this guy's movies (Basket Case) and I loved it so I can't wait to check out more. Here's Chip:
I first
saw Basket Case when I purchased the used DVD from Tower Records as it was
going out of business however many years ago that was. I had heard about it,
but regularly got it confused with the Larry Cohen seventies horror film It’s
Alive - due mostly to the similar wicker-themed cover. Instantly I loved it. It
was too fanciful for what I was looking for at the moment, but there was still
a disturbing, seedy, unsettling quality to the filmmaking that I loved. It
would five years before I would revisit the DVD. I was even more ecstatic about
the movie the second time. And so I decided it was time to explore the short
and sweet filmography of filmmaker Frank Henenlotter.
It’s
pretty easy to see how someone might find his movies off putting. The jokes alternate
between cartoonish buffoonery and pitch black gallows humor. The violence is
sudden, graphic, unrelenting, and not very convincing. The acting is uniformly
unprofessional. The cinematography is murky. The sets are seedy, stained,
sleazy, and shady. And the characters are reprehensible. And the body horror
... Henenlotter fetishizes scars, deformities, and mutations even more than
Cronenberg. But his movies are so damn irreverent and fun. His movies are never
scary, but they manage a powerful disturbing quality in their offbeat humor.
Henenlotter embraces his shortcomings (which are mostly financial and
taste-related) and creates a distinctive brand of horror comedy that no one
else dares emulate.
BASKET
CASE
A young
man named Duane keeps his deformed and detached siamese twin (Belial) in a
basket. Together they seek out the quack doctors who botched the separation
operation and take revenge on each of them in turn. Duane is played by
non-actor Kevin Van Hentenryck, who apparently never felt the need for a stage
name. This guy is so charmingly terrible. Yet his loyalty to his foam, immobile
sibling is completely believable. The Belial puppet is an astounding bit of
cheap plastic whose hollow eyes, ever-perched arm, and guttural scream make it
genuinely fucking creepy. It’s E.T. by way of Dead Ringers with hilariously
incompetent bit players and gory violence. This movie is a brilliant statement
on the destructive nature of family and familial loyalty.
Questions
raised: Is Belial a family name?
BRAIN
DAMAGE
A young
man named Brian happens upon a small phallic creature named "Aylmer."
Aylmer speaks in a cartoonish voice, lodges himself onto the back of his host’s
neck, inserts himself into the host’s blood stream, and excretes a liquid that
proves euphoric to the host. Brian becomes erratic trying to keep Aylmer in
check while an elderly couple who once kept Aylmer in a bathtub, soon come
looking for him.
Henenlotter
continues his exploration of good looking young men and their loyalty to grisly
creatures with dark agendas. Only this time, Henenlotter is more overtly
sexual. When Aylmer inserts himself into the back of Brian’s neck, Brian
grimaces, then moans with ecstacy as Aylmer inserts himself. Nothing sexual
here, folks. On the surface, the movie is a metaphor about drugs and addiction.
But the presentation is all about sex.
Typical
death: When Aylmer shoots out of Brian’s open zipper and into the mouth of a
morally questionable young woman attempting to give Brian a blow job. Aylmer
then rips out her brains.
Questions
raised: Why does one character make a point of spelling it
"A-y-l-m-e-r" when the credits clearly read "Elmer," as did
early posters. Did no one watch the movie before working on the credits?
BASKET
CASE 2
Duane
and Belial fall in with a group of absurd prosthetic monsters who look like
rejects from McDonald’s advertising campaigns of years past. It seems
Henenlotter got a bigger budget and got a fancier Belial puppet - compete with
moving eyes. Although I’m going to miss the empty-eyed, barely movable puppet
that screamed bloody murder (and occasionally broke into stop motion animation)
from the first movie, the fancier puppet makes the mutant-on-mutant sex towards
the end of the movie feel endlessly more disturbing than it would have been
otherwise. While this movie is still not for children or anyone with any sense
of taste or dignity, its sense of grotesquerie is less of the under-the-skin
variety. It seems to go straight for the gross out humor. It’s still a pleasure
to watch, but it doesn’t linger in the dark recesses of its audience’s psyche
the way the first film did.
FRANKENHOOKER
A young
man named Jeffrey Franken accidentally chops his fiancé to death with a remote
control lawnmower. He then steals the head, feeds explosive crack to hookers,
collects their body parts, and puts together a mottle of a hooker that asks
"Wanna date? Got any money?" This is perhaps Henenlotter’s most
mainstream movie. (I remember seeing the VHS box in video rental sections for
years.) It’s less horror than out-and-out comedy. Unfortunately, this film
doesn’t play it straight like his other films did. Don’t get me wrong. It’s
fucked up, but it feels more self-aware than his others.
BASKET
CASE 3
By the
third film in the series, Henenlotter had fully embraced a slapstick approach
to horror. (There’s one scene in this movie that feels ripped from a Muppet
film). There are long stretches without violence or menace.
Duane’s
motivations seem to change from scene to scene and in the end, there’s no
resonance to his ultimate fate (which is pretty incidental). Regardless, this
movie maintains the low budget, accidental feel of Henenlotter’s previous
films. It’s less sexual than his others (the only sexual scene is a mockery of
BDS&M). It may be weaker Henenlotter, but it still remains fully unique to
his filmmaking talents.
Typical
death: Belial leaps onto a police officer, half rips his face off (the sight of
his upper teeth hanging out of his mesh of skin is particularly memorable), and
then knocks his head off.
BAD
BIOLOGY
A young
man named Batz has a giant sentient penis. Nothing can satisfy it. Not even the
elaborate machine Batz has set up in his home to relieve himself sexually. He
is constantly at odds with the erratic bulge in his pants. Then he meets
Jennifer, a young woman with seven plus rabid clitorises that are never
satisfied. She is driven to sex men to death, and then ditch the mutated baby
that is birthed mere hours later. Batz’s penis soon proves not only sentient,
but detachable. It scours the neighborhood and rapes all the hot scantily clad
women lounging around their homes. The recurring image of the penis bursting
through the paneling is a highlight. Eventually, the two sex each other to
death - releasing a penis baby to the world.
This was
the first movie Henenlotter had directed in sixteen years. He had spent the
years since Basket Case 3 cultivating his home video company, Something Weird.
He returned the to the very same tropes that he started with. Amateur actors.
Sexualized monsters. Body image horror. And wonderfully perverted and deranged
sense of humor. I’m glad he took off time to recharge his batteries. As one
friend said to me after watching it: “I want to hug/punch you for that.”
There’s
no other filmmaker like Henenlotter. He’s so wonderfully adept at being inept.
He’s John Waters, David Cronenberg, and Andy Milligan all rolled into one.
Wrong-headed, tasteless, gross, and brilliantly hilarious. So far, every other
film he’s made has been a Basket Case movie – which means we’re due for
another. But if he doesn’t get around to Basket Case 4, Bad Biology is a
perfectly wrong movie to go out on.
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