2008’s Bad Biology is a sexually charged Black comedy horror film with…”Romance” elements?…From the mind of one Frank Henenlotter, a man who’s name is synonymous with exploitation and over the top horror hyjinks, whether it’s the psychological exploration of fraternal love in “Basket Case”, a psychedelic exploration of the psyche in “Brain Damage” or just a lark involving attempts in resurrecting your partner after a bizarre and bloody accident using the exploded body parts of prostitutes to fill in the gaps with “Frankenhooker”. Henenlotters courted controversy and outrage with an almost gleeful hand rubbing for over 50 years at this point. And Bad Biology (at the time of recording) is both his latest offering and probably his most explicit.

I actually have a bit of a problem with this review in the sense of there isnt a whole lot I can show from the film itself on youtube. Well over ⅔’rds of the movie feature either women fully unclothed, closeups of fake vaginas or penises, softcore sex that dances the line from comic to…well, the closest you can get to hardcore without officially going there. It’s…a pretty wild ride. The film follows Jennifer, a commercial photographer for magazines and advertising agencies who’s…not quite built like other girls. Jennifer has 7 Clitorises. And as such has been left in a chronic and constant state of high arousal. Doctors have been investigating how such a phenomenon can occur, and even Jen isn’t entirely sure as she can only go off what the doctors have been able to find.

But thats not all, as a result of this chronic state of arousal, Jen believes she’s the next step in female human evolution, constantly driven to satisfy her urges, she claims that sex for her is pretty close to her way of feeding. In the same way someone might guzzle down a hamburger to satiate hunger. Jen explains that sex for her is what keeps her satisfied. Theres also…one other thing. Jen has an accelerated uterus, whenever she has sex with guys she picks up at bars to “feed” on, her fertility rate is 100%. As in, unless she uses a condom, she gets pregnant every time, and because of theacceleration, pregnancy to birth usually occurs within a few minutes, resulting in the birth of a malformed “Freak Baby” which Jennifer usually abandons shortly after birth (she says the feeling of giving birth turns her on and gives her a secondary orgasm, so often she prefers to have unprotected sex, just for the added “thrill”)

Jen also brings her photography into the bedroom, capturing images of the men she has sex with “Mid Act” and distorting the images into what she refers to as “Fuck Face Photos”…oh…there is one other thing I’ve forgotten to mention as well…Jen kinda sorta accidentally murders her partners during sex, the orgasms become so intense, she loses control of her thought processes and her body takes over causing her quite often to blugeon her partners to death. …oh! And one final FINAL thing, she also claims her body has been hand built by god and that she’ll continue to murder “insufficient lovers” until she finds the “right fit” and that her ultimate purpose is to “fuck god”.

In the opening of the film we see Jen chat up some scumbag in a bar before she heads back to his place and..well it’s the end for him. We also see Jen attend a sexy photoshoot at a junkyard where an onlooker catches her eye and…well the same thing happens again, after some time in which she writhes around on a stack of her “Fuck face” photos on her bed, we find out that up until 2 years ago, Jen was a virgin. After spending her entire childhood being chastised by her parents and examined over and over again by the medical community, she figured that noone could ever love her, that she was a freak.

Then she met a chap called “Ryan” and the pair fell for each other pretty hard, Jen always played hard to get however and upon revealing to Ryan that she was a virgin, he pretty much immediately “reassured her” and by that I mean, he briefly tells her he loves her no matter what and IMMEDIATELY tries to get into her pants. On getting down there though he takes one look at her downstairs mix up and freaks the fuck out. Breaking up with her there and then and immediately kicking her out of the apartment. And since then, shes treated sex as a means to an end, but she’s desperate to recapture having a loving emotional relationship with someone that goes beyond 10 minutes of fun and a lampshade to the head.

It’s at this point we’re introduced to our other main player for the movie “Batz”, He…has a similar issue. When he was a child the doctors accidentally cut his penis off. Rendering him pretty much impotent. They reattached it, but he was warned that getting hard would be difficult to impossible. To try and combat this, when Batz got to high school he began to take stimulants and steroids in an attempt to get a boner…and it worked! Sort of…but it came with problems too. Chief amongst them being that his penis grew to a frankly absurd size and girth and err…how do I put this? It err…it developed sentience. It has a mind of its own.

It constantly wants sex and has driven Batz damn near mad with its demands to bone, so much so that he’s constantly having to get drug hookups from dealers to help get hard so he can use a homemade industrial strength fleshlight to help sooth the savage beast. And when I say he’s using dealers to score, im not talking about standard drugs here, the list of medications Batz needs are apparently stuff that even medical professionals havent heard of. Quite often the best the dealers can offer are the Animal equivalents of these drugs as they’re used in animal breeding.

Batz lives in a run down mansion that he purchased on the understanding that he’d clean the place up and repaint it, in keeping with the requests of the housing association. However the cocktail of drugs he’s been using to stop his dick has rendered him seriously ill, to the point that he has uncontrollable bouts of vomiting and can barely leave the house. And it’s here really that our two characters’ worlds collide as a mutual friend of Jen and Batz recommends Batz’s mansion as being the perfect place for Jen to hold a photoshoot for her latest gig. Batz is reluctant to let people into his home, and asks the mutual for 500 dollars for the privilege (he needs dick drugs), On the day of the shoot, Jen’s decided to go for a somewhat abstract choice of subject, topless women with vagina faces.

Batz gets home and spots the topless models and after peeping for a little while, one of the girls clocks him and calls security, who are all set to beat the crap out of him until the mutual friend arrives and tells them he’s the home owner. After apologising, the model decides to wind Batz up by being a bit of a tease, which frustrates Batz tremendously. When the shoot comes to a close, Jen is all set to leave when she realises she’s left her phone back in the house, she heads back into grab it, but gets sidetracked when she finds a room full of phallic notation and pill bottles, She then hears Batz having an argument with someone, and finds Batz literally fighting with his elongated donger. And shes impressed. And quickly becomes quite obsessed with seeing that thing in action.

On the way out Jen took Batz keys and later that night she returns to his place to further investigate, documenting her findings on a video camera. But things nearly turn sour when Batz returns home unexpectedly with a prostitute, Jen hides in a closet and hears Batz try to ask for some understanding with his ‘issues’. The prostitute takes this in her stride, but once the pork python has been released it IMMEDIATELY goes in for the kill, with a pleasure packed punch thats so powerful it causes the woman to become locked into a constant powerful orgasm. Jen is practically in love at this point and when the prostitute doesnt come down off the orgasm after an hour of Batz not even touching her, he decides he’s got to get rid of her and takes her to a nearby alleyway to ditch her off, Jen follows and films the womans pained orgasmic screams and later takes it home for a little…onanism.

And it’s here really that we enter our final act, as Batz and his dingus begin to seriously fall out and Jen decides that Batz dick is the reincarnation of “God”, she plans to confront him the next night and satisfy her cravings once and for all…however, before she can, Batz Penis decides it’s better off without him and severs ties…quite literally! In a spunky finale that…well I have a strong constitution and even I was somewhat agog by what I saw, Will Jen get her shag? Will Batz get to lead a normal non horny life? And…how did the penis severe itself from Batz and not cause Batz to bleed out in the process? hmm…Well all this and more will be answered if you check out “Bad Biology”

And, honestly; colour me impressed with this thing. It would be WAY too easy to just write this thing off as exploitation fodder and nothing more, but what we have here is a GENUINELY surprising sharp piece of cinema disguised as disposable exploitation fodder. Its kind of hard really to get a clock on the script for this thing because, the vast majority of it generally revolves and resolves around the line “And then they fuck”. In a lesser film I’d have berated the script for its overeliance on sex to sell the movie, but…given that the whole PLOT of this thing is “Woman who’s chronically aroused meets a man with a sentient penis who can lock people into permanent orgasms” I think it would be a bit glib of me to have come away from this thing slamming it for being TOO overtly sexual.

I could pick on it if it were trying to be porn in horrors clothing, but what surprised me really was just how well the comedy elements of this script were handled. Don’t get me wrong, this is a bleak script, its a lot of frustrated, ill and sad people desperately trying to find closure one way or another, but theres a jet black streak of comedy running right through this thing that caught me off guard on multiple occasions and seldom if ever disappointed. The actual writing and dialogue for this film is WAY better than it deserves to be, with decently structured fluid and charismatic lines that gave pathos when required but also hit the perfect tone of humour.

The majority of the film is communicated visually or via monologues, so it’s kind of hard to comment on the script beyond the dialogue that is written, especially given that so much of the time is given up to fucking. But what I can say is the script has a nippy pacing, seldom feels sluggish and does have a clear 3 act structure with decent transitions between the three, even if those three acts are a little lopsided (Personally I think the second act is a little too long, and the third act a little too short)

I also have to say, the 3rd act, while DEFINITELY having a surprising ending that caught me off g rd, does get a little repetitive. With shots of Batz Sentient penis effectivley just going room to room and assaulting women over and over again, by the 3rd time it happened on screen I reckoned I’d seen everything I needed to see, that being said given the film clocks in at an hour and 25 minutes or so, I think had they done the “proper” option of just showing a quick cut montage of the dick going from apartment to apartment in a nice tight snappy edited package, the film would have probably just dipped under running time. It’s padding, but I guess it serves it’s purpose…

Thats another problem with the script, despite the sharp dialogue and “Unique” plot structuring. There is a LOT of padding fleshing out those acts to get it over runtime. The sex scenes always seem to run for just a little bit longer than necessary which, I can see the argument being made that these scenes ARE supposed to be uncomfortable and a bit awkward, they’re SUPPOSED to show the desperation of sex addiction and how it’s not a glossy romantic experience but rather, one of desperate necessity. While its all well and good trying to put that message across, I still feel like it went a bit TOO hard on drilling that message in (probably in an attempt to get the runtime up).

Sex aside, theres also just generic padding here, Jen exploring Batz house is protracted to the point that I nearly started to lose focus, scenes where Batz argues with the residents committee for 5 minutes or so for no particular reason, I mean…the association never turn up again, Batz doesnt do anything to fix his house, it just seems like a scene designed to waste time and get a couple of knob jokes in while they’re at it. Scenes of the vagina mask shoot just roll on and on with no solid end in sight.

It reminded me a bit of the review I wrote for “Final Scream” where I argued that Decoteau used “Pinch an inch” techniques, lingering on shots *slightly* longer than needed to quite literally pinch a minute or two here and there across the whole movies runtime juuuuust to nudge into a sellable feature length format. it’s unfortunately present here, which did rather diminish the experience for me. But on the whole, this is a very charged, dirty and daring production that I feel more or less hits the spot for me more than it misses, even if it does show signs of struggling to keep afloat at times.

The film was Co-written by R.A the Rugged Man, who…to the best of my knowledge is a rapper, he’s mainly an actor and producer, with most of his credits being towards his own music videos, this isnt his only writing credit, but it is his only feature credit. The film was directed and co-written by Frank Henenlotter, a marvel of the B-movie horror scene. While he’s not exactly hitting Corman numbers on the credits front, the 10 feature directing credits and 9 writing credits he DOES have across a near 50 year career in movie making are some of the most challenging and diverse exploitation pics to come out of that decade. Im not saying he’s never made a bad movie, Im just saying I have yet to see a Henenlotter flick i’ve actively disliked.

And on the direction front, we have a fairly professional looking low to mid budget shoot on our hands here, Henenlotters passion for bright pastel colours and practical effects shots contrasting with dank and grungy envionments really shines through in this film, only hear, I’d argue we’re actually seeing his type of stylisation at it’s most extreme end of the wedge with locations like Batz’s house looking positively exemplary of 2000’s grunge culture seriously these sets look like something out of the Saw movies, and contrasting that we just have those subtle splashes of colour here and there to really add distinction, from Jens powder pink sweater in the opening moments of the film, to the “Brain damage” blue hue of the steroids Batz injects himself with, to even more subtle things like the wig colours used on the models in studio shoots.

His management of the sequence structure is pretty exemplary, theres never a moment where I felt sequences lacked coherency and I feel that he’s been able to work with each aspect of the production to deliver a crafted package that, while definitely not to everyone’s taste, was absolutely to mine. A feat made all the more impressive when you realise that, at the time of filming, Henenlotter was battling Cancer and was quite literally attending radiotherapy sessions first thing in the morning, then heading to set for 9am to film for a full day. Which is just…my GOD the mans a machine. That’s passion to the art right there. In fact; the only issue I could actually really pull up is the direction of the cast.

Now; im not referring to the primary cast here. Our leading man and lady do a damn fine job. But theres just something not quite right about the supporting cast in this feature, they seem quite fixed to the spot, a lot of the performances come across as a bit porny (likely due to the fact they’re adult performers) and even when it looks like they’ve been given scope to improvise, they just…dont really do what i’d have expected a supporting cast to do. If your told to possibly improvise a piece in a scene, I’d have expected them to move about, maybe grab a prop and use it, possibly even think about a good quip or something to help give that scene a bit of emphasis. But instead whenever those moments do arise, theyl generally just gurn. Or will say something ultra generic or not really relevant to the plot at all. It’s the weakest aspect of the direction and I feel it probably could have been a lot tighter.

On the cine front, what we have here is largely very impressive, shot compositions follow the rule of thirds, it looks professional and there’s a nice attention to detail for most of the films runtime in creating a product that has that extra level of polish and sheen. Sequences have a decent amount of cuts and shot types within them to allow for an engaging viewing experience that doesn’t feel dithered and it’s nice to see some experimentation here with a mixture of digital and practical effects that don’t oversaturate the cines key compositional structures. Its just a really lovely piece of work and again, better than I could have expected.

There are a few things thought that did fall a bit flat for me personally, some scenes do feel a bit rushed on lighting and shot choices. The scene with the topless vagina faced women just looked a bit off grade with the rest of the film. It felt like there hadn’t been much thought put into how these scenes could be best shot, so they just did it freehand and hoped that people would mistake it as a stylistic choice. The whole film is bathed in a sickly warm yellowish light which really is the key feature of the grade, but that one scene in particular (presumably because of the wall colours and lack of structured lighting) just looked very pale and clinical against the rest of the films grade, which wouldn’t have been that big of an issue had it been a throwaway scene, but it’s the point where our main characters meet for the first time, which draws attention to just how out of sorts it feels against the rest of the edit.

Theres some minor lighting issues as well which result in a hit and miss experience, when the lighting is done well its exemplary and really helps give the film a BIG quality boost, particularly the chiaroscuro sections. But theres just some moments in this film where either the shot wasn’t quite angled right, or the lighting choices weren’t quite 100% where it just looks a bit rubbish in my opinion. There was one sex scene in particular where the shot was framed with Jen and a guy having sex in the middle of the shot, with heavy shadowy vignetting flanking the left and right of the frame and just this…column of chiascuro light beaming right down the middle of the frame, had the angle or colour of the light been slightly different it might have worked better, but what was presented…just looked quite ugly to me.

Thats another minor issue, some of the sex scenes themselves. I know they’re not supposed to be erotic (or at least, eroticism is a secondary to the desperation) but some of the scenes are just framed awkwardly, and not in such a way thats supposed to draw emphasis to Jen or Batz situation, they’re done in such a way that looks like it was the only place the camera could go to get the shot, or like there was something in the frame they didnt want seen. And as a result a handful of these scenes really drop in professional quality…in my opinion at least.

Performance wise, as mentioned this film belongs to Charlee Danielson and Anthony Sneed as Jen and Batz respectively. While their deliveries performance wise waver eeeeever so slightly into the cringy at times (how much of that is the performance and how much is the dialogue is up for debate) I felt they were two of the best people for these roles, they do their best to sell you on their characters and I think by the end of the film I was more or less won over by them. And given how much of the film is softcore porn, it was SUPER important that they get these roles right in terms of character and style. Which…im happy to say, to me? They aced it.

The supporting cast…not so much, as mentioned previously it’s a bit porny in style, due to all the adult performers involved in it. But that means you have this grungy, quite well thought out script about addiction, loss and love that ends up ultimately being hindered by lackluster supporting performances that just stops it from ever really coming into its own as a production. The extras are predominently bolted to the spot, do their lines in short bursts (presumably because they cant remember their lines) and go no further than enter stage/exit stage physical instructions…occasionally while holding a prop. So yeh…big disappointment there in my opinion.

And finally; the soundtrack; and the biggest problem this film has from a technical standpoint is the audio mix. I don’t know if it’s just the way the DVD I have has been authored or if it was just mixed this way, but the character dialogue, which is mumbly to begin with, has been mixed either only *Slightly* higher than the backing music, or equal to it. Which means you have mumbly audio I can bearly hear over the score. AND theres no subtitle options…so…there was a lot of pausing, rewinding and replaying this movie with the volume cranked right up to try and make out what was being said. Which was irritating and I feel kind of let the film down a bit, because if I have to keep stopping the movie to figure out what’s being said, it can really take you out of the moment for the broader picture.

The score itself is generic as balls too. If you’ve ever watched a full moon features production from 1997 onwards, you’ve heard the score for this movie. Theres just a distinct tone and style to Full moon scores that isnt really present in other films or stock music. And given Henenlotter and Band move in the same circles, it wouldnt surprise me if the music was either composed by or half inched by someone who’d done work for full moon in the past. It’s by the numbers, dead behind the eyes, “fills the void” type fodder which again, I think only really lets down what could have been a much more interesting auditry experience.

Given Henenlotters condition during the making of this film I think Bad Biology is an absolute miracle. this shouldn’t work as a film. But the script has tight and interesting writing, the main cast play their roles with sincerity and a tone that worked for me. The direction and cine largely looks great all things considered (ESPECIALLY since the thing was shot on 16mm offcuts and short ends…which could have ended VERY badly)

That doesnt however save it from having a few dings on the quality along the way, its a bit padded, some scenes fall a bit flat in terms of composition, the audio quality is mixed to poor and in my opinion some of the lighting choices are questionable. On the whole though? Theres WAY more to love with this thing than loath and i’d absolutely recommend it if you can get your hands on it, if you love Henenlotters other better known works, this is absolutely the next level of that. If your a horror fan, I think you’ll enjoy the gorefactor and even if your just a broad exploitation aficionado I think you’ll dig this (though maybe wish things were a *BIT* more explicit.) all I know is, it really got me hoping Henenlotter gets back to fiction film making some day, as i’d love to see what he could come up with next.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/bad-biology/1/