Anatomy of a murderer
A review requested by Kelleson, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon.
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Midway through director Frank Henenlotter's sixth and (thus far) last narrative feature, the 2008 Bad Biology, one of the co-protagonists is conducting a photography shoot, starring topless female models wearing masks that look like giant vaginas. Another character - her assistant, a financier, something (the film has other priorities than making sure its characters make sense) - watches the proceedings with a look of sour disapproval, and renders her verdict thus: "This not clever. This is not intelligent. This is not artistic. This is crude, gutter-level filth." And in that moment, Henenlotter is laying it all on the table: he is so very desperate for us to think exactly those words about his own film. He obviously means for this to be the culmination to his celebration of the vulgar and prurient and exploitative and low-brow and antisocial, the subjects of all his films going back to his 1982 debut Basket Case. I have seen very few movies that make their own trashy incompetence such a crucial, central part of their aesthetic, their theme, their worldview. This is not merely cheap because it didn't cost much. It's cheap because the filmmakers urgently wanted to make something as crude and off-putting as possible, in every way possible. It is gaudily artless in ways that you don't get to by accident, but only because artlessness is your avowed priority. At one point, there's a camera POV, with the visible reticle and the red "REC" in the corner and all, and the word "REC" has been typed in a serif typeface that makes it look like the whole graphic was created in Microsoft Word. Just that kind of thing that you would only get wrong because you were trying to.
Bad Biology is a movie looking to push buttons: all of them, all the time, indiscriminately. The opening line, spoken over black, is "I was born with seven clits" - and to Henenlotter's great credit, and the credit of his co-writer R.A. Thornburn, AKA "R.A. The Rugged Man" (Bad Biology's credits include a remarkable number of nicknames; it feels like he did most of the casting by asking his buddies who were trying to make as rappers in New York if they wanted to help him do a movie, and they all went under their stage names), this absolutely precedes to be a movie that earns that kind of opening line. At no point during its 84 minutes does it let up: it has an apparently infinite reservoir of ideas to pull out as to what might be shocking, or offensive, or revolting. It is clearly motivated, first and foremost, by a passionate desire to be unpleasant to watch - unpleasant and funny, to be sure, if you're on the right wavelength, and I don't even think it's a terribly hard wavelength to get on, though I imagine it would take an awfully specific sort of person to stay on that wavelength for a significant stretch of time.
But, in the main, this is clearly trying to be unsettling, unlikable, off-putting. And this is true not merely in terms of its content, though the content is, beyond a shadow of doubt, working that territory. The bad biology of the title is, unsurprisingly, entirely about sex and childbirth: Jennifer (Charlee Danielsen, who has no other screen credits that I can find, though she seems to have been active in the same "almost but not quite making it" NYC scenes as all the rappers) has, as noted, seven clitorises - clitorii? - and as a result is basically always sexually aroused and extremely quick to reach orgasm. Of late, she's also been apparently constantly ovulating, and when she's impregnated (which happens a lot, due to the other things), the entire gestation happens in a matter of hours, after which she abandons the mutant babies to die quick, unmourned deaths. Batz (Anthony Sneed) had his penis severed in infancy, and sewn back on such that it was no longer functional; as a teenager, he took a homebrew cocktail of exotic drugs in an effort to give himself erections, and instead so thoroughly screwed up his biochemistry that his penis is now a semi-autonomous agent, always tumescent and impossible to fully relieve. And also he needs to keep taking all those drugs to prevent it from dying - in the words of the film's third main statement of purpose, much later than the seven clits line, "I have a drug-addicted dick with a mind of its own." Plainly, Bad Biology is leading us to suppose that these two always-horny sex-starved lonely souls will hook up and finally provide each other the insatiable partnership they need; this is indeed part of the implication of the film's advertising tagline, "A god awful love story." Another part of the implication is that things are going to be horrible for these characters, and in fact the development of the plot is not nearly as pat and conventional as that; Jennifer and Batz barely even meet each other during the film, in fact. Because even having set up this tale of sexual mutants whose existence is a revolting parody of both normative heterosexuality and sexual libertinism, Henenlotter still insists on making things as prickly as he possibly can: not even the story structure is going to be a comfort to us.
And to return to what I said at the top of that last paragraph, that the film's off-putting elements aren't limited to its content, it's not limited to its structure, either. Down to its very last formal element, Bad Biology is fucking with us, providing the nastiest experience it possibly can. The simple way to phrase it would be to say, "it's badly made" - too simple, in fact. It sure looks bad. It sounds bad. It probably is bad. There is not the slightest chance this is accidental. There is something aggressive about it. This is tricky kind of "bad on purpose", one that I'm not sure I've ever seen before. It is not, for example, the "parody of a bad movie" style of bad-on-purpose, your comedy film whose subject is bad filmmaking, such as The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra or Psycho Beach Party. Nor is it one of those "trying to make a shockingly bad cult object on purpose" films, of whom the standard bearer surely must be Sharknado. It's more like Henenlotter wanted the object itself to be a devoid of gentility as the rude, rough content of the narrative, or the brutal human oddities around whom he has built that narrative; if you're the sort of person so callused and toughened up by a lifetime of exploitation films that the notion of "woman gives birth so often and so readily that she just drops her hideously deformed babies off to die in random places" can't give you a moment's pause, the sheer blank ugly artlessness of the presentation will. There's no style buffing the bleakness off the content, in other words; there's barely even drama. I have mentioned the story lacks any conventional structure, instead just leaping from Jennifer to Batz and back; it also refuses to characterize them much, drawing from Danielsen and Sneed a pair of utterly toneless, uninteresting, uncharismatic performances.
I cannot explain in words why I am so breezily confident that this is all very much on purpose; but I absolutely am. Henenlotter seems to have amassed a great deal of bitterness in the 17 years since his previous feature, 1991's Basket Case 3: The Progeny; I imagine the fact that he ended up even getting to make one last feature came as a surprise, as well as imagining that a lot of those 17 years were frustrating. Between the frustration and the opportunity to let ideas simmer and steep, he has poured so much hostily, grungy energy into Bad Biology that it's a little bit remarkable 84 minutes was enough to contain it all. This is both an apotheosis and antithesis of the kind of dark-souled exploitation film he excelled at in his heyday. The exploitation is there all over the place, in the frequent nudity, the grotesque puppetry of Jennifer's mutant babies and Batz'z mangled cock, the feeling that the camera has just wandered into drug-fueled pits of deeply impoverished despair and happens to be capturing the raw human life there, rather than shaping it for a movie. But he seems to know that his only audience in 2008 will be the kind of exploitation cognoscenti for whom that's all just a day at the office, so he has endeavored to make a film that will discombobulate that audience the way that e.g. Basket Case one upon might have discombobulated an audience of squares.
It's remarkable and full of undisguised glee at how hard it's going toward every possible excess, how unrelentingly indecent it all gets to be, how much energy it can pour into finding new ways of being creatively crass, like a POV shot looking out from Jennifer's vagina. The film even ends with a rap by R.A. The Rugged Man in which he enthusiastically recalls how hard but also cool it was to make this movie with noted cult icon Frank Henenlotter. There's joy here, savage and lewd, but joyous nonetheless. 17 years did not dim Henenlotter's instincts - he was a sharp filmmaker in 1982, he remained a sharp filmmaker in 2008, and if the universe conspires to let him make another film in the time he has left on this earth, I imagine he will prove to be still a sharp filmmaker.
The only reservation I have about all of this: it's just constantly going. A few minutes of the perversions of family, motherhood, sex, religion, and whatever else are bracing - as bracing as anything I could imagine even for the late 2000s, when there was a brief flourishing of grimy exploitation films. It is exciting to see a film playing with fire and bile and poison as recklessly as Bad Biology does. But the thing is, it knows that it's doing this, it's proud to be doing this, it can already dream about the reviews it's going to get from the horror and B-movie blogs. And to make sure it makes its point clear, it starts at 100% - for if the seven clits line isn't 100%, it's surely not more than a digit or two below that. And the thing is, once you decide to begin with the (as it were) climax, where do you get to go? Bad Biology leaves itself absolutely no room for modulation or escalation, and it clearly assumes that slowing things down, even if it's just so it can speed back up again, would be letting us off the hook. So it becomes something that a movie looking to shock us to the marrow of our bones cannot become: it's monotonous, in the very literal sense of "only has one tone". Sure, it eventually gets to the necrotic penis puppet, but otherwise what it's doing by the 90-second mark is what it will be doing two minutes before the end credits. And that unrelenting pummeling ends up become a bit numbing, so that eventually one just starts watching the film's depraved ideas with a kind of satiated nod of "yep, that seems where this would be likely to go". It's a tough place for a movie this dedicated to being transgressive to find itself, just kind of riding out its running time making the same sick joke over and over again. But I'll say this for it, Henenlotter obviously believes in that joke, and I'm glad he had a chance to tell it.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
Do you have a movie you'd like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page!
Midway through director Frank Henenlotter's sixth and (thus far) last narrative feature, the 2008 Bad Biology, one of the co-protagonists is conducting a photography shoot, starring topless female models wearing masks that look like giant vaginas. Another character - her assistant, a financier, something (the film has other priorities than making sure its characters make sense) - watches the proceedings with a look of sour disapproval, and renders her verdict thus: "This not clever. This is not intelligent. This is not artistic. This is crude, gutter-level filth." And in that moment, Henenlotter is laying it all on the table: he is so very desperate for us to think exactly those words about his own film. He obviously means for this to be the culmination to his celebration of the vulgar and prurient and exploitative and low-brow and antisocial, the subjects of all his films going back to his 1982 debut Basket Case. I have seen very few movies that make their own trashy incompetence such a crucial, central part of their aesthetic, their theme, their worldview. This is not merely cheap because it didn't cost much. It's cheap because the filmmakers urgently wanted to make something as crude and off-putting as possible, in every way possible. It is gaudily artless in ways that you don't get to by accident, but only because artlessness is your avowed priority. At one point, there's a camera POV, with the visible reticle and the red "REC" in the corner and all, and the word "REC" has been typed in a serif typeface that makes it look like the whole graphic was created in Microsoft Word. Just that kind of thing that you would only get wrong because you were trying to.
Bad Biology is a movie looking to push buttons: all of them, all the time, indiscriminately. The opening line, spoken over black, is "I was born with seven clits" - and to Henenlotter's great credit, and the credit of his co-writer R.A. Thornburn, AKA "R.A. The Rugged Man" (Bad Biology's credits include a remarkable number of nicknames; it feels like he did most of the casting by asking his buddies who were trying to make as rappers in New York if they wanted to help him do a movie, and they all went under their stage names), this absolutely precedes to be a movie that earns that kind of opening line. At no point during its 84 minutes does it let up: it has an apparently infinite reservoir of ideas to pull out as to what might be shocking, or offensive, or revolting. It is clearly motivated, first and foremost, by a passionate desire to be unpleasant to watch - unpleasant and funny, to be sure, if you're on the right wavelength, and I don't even think it's a terribly hard wavelength to get on, though I imagine it would take an awfully specific sort of person to stay on that wavelength for a significant stretch of time.
But, in the main, this is clearly trying to be unsettling, unlikable, off-putting. And this is true not merely in terms of its content, though the content is, beyond a shadow of doubt, working that territory. The bad biology of the title is, unsurprisingly, entirely about sex and childbirth: Jennifer (Charlee Danielsen, who has no other screen credits that I can find, though she seems to have been active in the same "almost but not quite making it" NYC scenes as all the rappers) has, as noted, seven clitorises - clitorii? - and as a result is basically always sexually aroused and extremely quick to reach orgasm. Of late, she's also been apparently constantly ovulating, and when she's impregnated (which happens a lot, due to the other things), the entire gestation happens in a matter of hours, after which she abandons the mutant babies to die quick, unmourned deaths. Batz (Anthony Sneed) had his penis severed in infancy, and sewn back on such that it was no longer functional; as a teenager, he took a homebrew cocktail of exotic drugs in an effort to give himself erections, and instead so thoroughly screwed up his biochemistry that his penis is now a semi-autonomous agent, always tumescent and impossible to fully relieve. And also he needs to keep taking all those drugs to prevent it from dying - in the words of the film's third main statement of purpose, much later than the seven clits line, "I have a drug-addicted dick with a mind of its own." Plainly, Bad Biology is leading us to suppose that these two always-horny sex-starved lonely souls will hook up and finally provide each other the insatiable partnership they need; this is indeed part of the implication of the film's advertising tagline, "A god awful love story." Another part of the implication is that things are going to be horrible for these characters, and in fact the development of the plot is not nearly as pat and conventional as that; Jennifer and Batz barely even meet each other during the film, in fact. Because even having set up this tale of sexual mutants whose existence is a revolting parody of both normative heterosexuality and sexual libertinism, Henenlotter still insists on making things as prickly as he possibly can: not even the story structure is going to be a comfort to us.
And to return to what I said at the top of that last paragraph, that the film's off-putting elements aren't limited to its content, it's not limited to its structure, either. Down to its very last formal element, Bad Biology is fucking with us, providing the nastiest experience it possibly can. The simple way to phrase it would be to say, "it's badly made" - too simple, in fact. It sure looks bad. It sounds bad. It probably is bad. There is not the slightest chance this is accidental. There is something aggressive about it. This is tricky kind of "bad on purpose", one that I'm not sure I've ever seen before. It is not, for example, the "parody of a bad movie" style of bad-on-purpose, your comedy film whose subject is bad filmmaking, such as The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra or Psycho Beach Party. Nor is it one of those "trying to make a shockingly bad cult object on purpose" films, of whom the standard bearer surely must be Sharknado. It's more like Henenlotter wanted the object itself to be a devoid of gentility as the rude, rough content of the narrative, or the brutal human oddities around whom he has built that narrative; if you're the sort of person so callused and toughened up by a lifetime of exploitation films that the notion of "woman gives birth so often and so readily that she just drops her hideously deformed babies off to die in random places" can't give you a moment's pause, the sheer blank ugly artlessness of the presentation will. There's no style buffing the bleakness off the content, in other words; there's barely even drama. I have mentioned the story lacks any conventional structure, instead just leaping from Jennifer to Batz and back; it also refuses to characterize them much, drawing from Danielsen and Sneed a pair of utterly toneless, uninteresting, uncharismatic performances.
I cannot explain in words why I am so breezily confident that this is all very much on purpose; but I absolutely am. Henenlotter seems to have amassed a great deal of bitterness in the 17 years since his previous feature, 1991's Basket Case 3: The Progeny; I imagine the fact that he ended up even getting to make one last feature came as a surprise, as well as imagining that a lot of those 17 years were frustrating. Between the frustration and the opportunity to let ideas simmer and steep, he has poured so much hostily, grungy energy into Bad Biology that it's a little bit remarkable 84 minutes was enough to contain it all. This is both an apotheosis and antithesis of the kind of dark-souled exploitation film he excelled at in his heyday. The exploitation is there all over the place, in the frequent nudity, the grotesque puppetry of Jennifer's mutant babies and Batz'z mangled cock, the feeling that the camera has just wandered into drug-fueled pits of deeply impoverished despair and happens to be capturing the raw human life there, rather than shaping it for a movie. But he seems to know that his only audience in 2008 will be the kind of exploitation cognoscenti for whom that's all just a day at the office, so he has endeavored to make a film that will discombobulate that audience the way that e.g. Basket Case one upon might have discombobulated an audience of squares.
It's remarkable and full of undisguised glee at how hard it's going toward every possible excess, how unrelentingly indecent it all gets to be, how much energy it can pour into finding new ways of being creatively crass, like a POV shot looking out from Jennifer's vagina. The film even ends with a rap by R.A. The Rugged Man in which he enthusiastically recalls how hard but also cool it was to make this movie with noted cult icon Frank Henenlotter. There's joy here, savage and lewd, but joyous nonetheless. 17 years did not dim Henenlotter's instincts - he was a sharp filmmaker in 1982, he remained a sharp filmmaker in 2008, and if the universe conspires to let him make another film in the time he has left on this earth, I imagine he will prove to be still a sharp filmmaker.
The only reservation I have about all of this: it's just constantly going. A few minutes of the perversions of family, motherhood, sex, religion, and whatever else are bracing - as bracing as anything I could imagine even for the late 2000s, when there was a brief flourishing of grimy exploitation films. It is exciting to see a film playing with fire and bile and poison as recklessly as Bad Biology does. But the thing is, it knows that it's doing this, it's proud to be doing this, it can already dream about the reviews it's going to get from the horror and B-movie blogs. And to make sure it makes its point clear, it starts at 100% - for if the seven clits line isn't 100%, it's surely not more than a digit or two below that. And the thing is, once you decide to begin with the (as it were) climax, where do you get to go? Bad Biology leaves itself absolutely no room for modulation or escalation, and it clearly assumes that slowing things down, even if it's just so it can speed back up again, would be letting us off the hook. So it becomes something that a movie looking to shock us to the marrow of our bones cannot become: it's monotonous, in the very literal sense of "only has one tone". Sure, it eventually gets to the necrotic penis puppet, but otherwise what it's doing by the 90-second mark is what it will be doing two minutes before the end credits. And that unrelenting pummeling ends up become a bit numbing, so that eventually one just starts watching the film's depraved ideas with a kind of satiated nod of "yep, that seems where this would be likely to go". It's a tough place for a movie this dedicated to being transgressive to find itself, just kind of riding out its running time making the same sick joke over and over again. But I'll say this for it, Henenlotter obviously believes in that joke, and I'm glad he had a chance to tell it.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
