Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on April 5, 2008, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
“We didn’t want to make a normal movie,” Frank Henenlotter said of himself and producer/co-writer/rapper R.A. “The Rugged Man” Thorburn, introducing Bad Biology at the Philadelphia Film Festival. “We wanted something that was just wrong.” And to paraphrase the popular saying, if going against the usual genre grain is wrong, who wants to be right? Bad Biology marks the welcome and long-overdue return (after 16 years without a feature) of one of the most unique and committed visions in independent horror, one whose underground sensibilities clearly haven’t mellowed with age. If anything, Bad Biology is even more deranged than his previous works, and where sex was just one element or an undercurrent in the likes of Frankenhooker and Brain Damage, here the carnal takes center stage.
Jennifer (Charlee Danielson) is a New York City photographer with a penchant for twisted and murderous imagery that nonetheless has nothing on her personal life. Born with eight clitorises (clitori?), she possesses an insatiable sexual hunger that leads her to kill any man she sleeps with in a violent erotic frenzy. Across town, Batz (Anthony Sneed) is struggling to control his abnormal phallus, which he himself has mutated with drugs and is now several times normal size and out of his physical control. As Jennifer continues to claim male lives and Batz tries to keep his rebellious oversized organ in line with more pills and injections, their paths are fated to cross when Jennifer winds up staging a photo shoot in Batz’s house featuring models (among them indie horror queen Tina Krause) wearing female-genitalia masks…but you’ve got the idea by now, right?
Clearly, we’re smack in the middle of Henenlotter’s familiar world of freaks, outsiders and twisted addictions (though the focus on male and female protagonists with aberrant sexual anatomy also recalls Sixteen Tongues, whose writer/director Scooter McCrae served as an editor here). As much a twisted love story as a horror film, Bad Biology is also about unconventional chemistry, as it becomes clear that Jennifer and Batz were made—albeit by God in the former’s case and himself in the latter’s—for each other. It’s also chock full of Henenlotter’s traditional pitch-black humor, both verbal and visual (including shots from the points of view of both leads’ naughty parts), religious overtones (Jennifer believes the Lord made her the way she is so He can make love to her) and plenty of nudity, plus a number of gratuitous rapper cameos thanks to the involvement of Thorburn, who also takes a flashback role as Jennifer’s abusive first boyfriend.
With all the craziness going on, Henenlotter manages to keep it from spinning out of control, and the grounding has quite a bit to do with the conviction that Danielson and Sneed bring to their extremely unconventional roles. The duo make their feature debuts in Bad Biology, and their rawness works for the parts, clearly willing to go for it in their first movie leads. Henenlotter and his creative team support their efforts with a technical acuity that belies the movie’s very low budget: Nick Deeg’s shadowy cinematography, Gabe Bartalos’ perverse makeup FX and Prince Paul’s full-blooded horror score are all major assets.
Bad Biology does have moments when Henenlotter and Thorburn’s devotion to excess comes to seem…well, excessive; there are probably one or two too many victims, for example, in a climactic rampage that I’m not going to begin to describe. But if such overkill is the risk the filmmakers take in so zealously exploring the outer limits of their warped imaginations, it’s Bad Biology’s achievement that it never completely flies off the rails. It’s a testament to the fact that even the greatest amount of bad taste can succeed via good wit, and with a practiced hand like Henenlotter’s at the helm. Let’s hope it’s not another decade and a half before he next shares his compellingly strange worldview with us.
