Jennifer (Charlee Danielson) has a strange problem: she was born with seven clits. This has given her a voracious sexual appetite, and though she thinks that the idea of nymphomania was a myth thought up by anti-female men, she has to admit that she fits the description. What she now spends her spare time doing, when she is not attending to her job as a photographer, is picking up men in bars, the less salubrious the better, and going back to their place where she has sex with them, then kills them, like a black widow spider. The effect of this is that her biology makes her give birth within minutes - but Jennifer doesn't want a baby...
No, all she wants is the ultimate orgasm in this, Frank Henenlotter's first film after a long break away from the movie business. It was funded by one of his fans, R.A. Thorburn, a rapper better known under the name R.A. The Rugged Man, who wanted to see Henenlotter make a return to filmmaking in his own particular style, and you couldn't say that there were many people making horror film like Bad Biology which appears to have been written to be as outrageous as possible, yet somehow doesn't quite play that way, the main problem being that the joie de vivre of many of the auteur's previous films was curiously absent.
So this film feels weirdly grim instead of a great big goofy laugh, and indeed giggles are thin on the ground. It's not helped by being shot on ugly-looking video when it really could have done with the gloss of film, with the result that it comes across a cheap and seedy. Now, the original Basket Case wasn't exactly a highly polished production, but that suited the time and settings it was made in, yet here it seems to be an amateur effort that happened to have a bit of cash at its disposal for special effects. It's not helped by the cast being inappropriately serious-minded throughout when a little more winking at the audience would not have gone amiss.
Jennifer, you think, is going to be taught a lesson about responsibility after leaving dead bodies and mutant babies around the city, but it never happens. Rather this is a tale of obsession, about how sex can take over your mind to the exclusion of all else, and here it's on a level with the bad fixations of Dr Frankenstein trying to create life from the dead or Count Dracula's overwhelming need for blood. Everything she does is in the service of those seven clits, apart from a spot of photography - she manages to combine the two by snapping a pic at the moment of her partners' climax. But mainly it's all about feeding her libido.
However, she has a male counterpart, and it doesn't take a genius to work out that these two are going to meet at some point. And meet they do, when Jennifer is working at the apartment building of Batz (Anthony Sneed), one of Henenlotter's much put upon, victim of circumstance heroes who is having trouble in the downstairs department. Specifically he has a monster penis which is as insatiable as Jennifer, and not even an industrial-looking masturbation machine can help him. It's true that there's a twisted imagination at work here, but when Batz's manhood eventually detaches itself to go on the rampage in a surprisingly joyless fashion, fans of this kind of exploitation movie will be reminded of similar scenes in Jonathan Yudis' Pervert! which presented the premise with far more sprightly handling. But for all the reservations, it is a Henenlotter film and there's nobody exactly like him, and he does work up a few inspired images. Music by Josh Glazer and Prince Paul.
American director of trashy horror comedies. Made his debut in 1982 with the cult splatter favourite Basket Case, which he followed in 1988 with the similarly themed, equally gruesome drug addiction-analogy Brain Damage. Frankenhooker was a taste-free updating of Frankenstein, while Basket Cases 2 and 3 followed in the early 90s. After a long gap overseeing the preservation and distribution of vintage grindhouse movies, he returned to directing with Bad Biology in 2008.
