Bad Biology (2008)

Movie quotes:
"For years I used to hate god. What kind of bastard creator would make me this way? I’d fantasize about spitting in his face and ripping his eyeballs out and inflicting in him the same pain he’s inflicted in me. But I’ve now learned to understand him. I now realize just how loving god is. He loves me so much that he’s given me a gift. I can feel seven times the sexual pleasure of any human being. And now he’s given me babies. Not for me to keep, of course, but as a preparation for his holy child. God has been building and designing my one purpose and one purpose only. God wants to fuck me."
- Jennifer (Charlee Danielson)

"Jennifer! Vagina faces! What were you thinking?"
- Magazine Editor (James Glickenhaus)

At a glance:
After 16 years, bizarre horror filmmaker Frank Henenlotter returns with this over-the-top, alternatively hilarious and sickening tale of a women with seven clitori and a man with a huge sentient penis

Our review (with spoilers):
What’s the plural of clitoris? It’s not a word that needs to be used in the plural form very much. But in the case of Jennifer (Charlee Danielson), it does. You see, she has seven of them – at least seven, maybe more. And the drive to satisfy her sexual urges leads to violent sex with numerous partners that sometimes ends in death for the man if she gets too carried away. There’s another side effect to her ‘condition’; two hours after having sex, she sometimes gives birth to a deformed undersized baby – a baby that she simply ignores and leaves to die.

Now she may have found her perfect mate – Batz (Anthony Sneed), a young man who, in his quest to be able to masturbate, has been injecting his penis directly with steroids, until his own organ has become a huge, sentient, sex-crazed drug addict. But just as Jennifer is heading over to Batz’s house to attempt to consummate their relationship, a turn of events complicates matters: Batz’s penis detaches itself and heads off on its own!

Bad Biology is a harsh, sometimes revolting, sometimes hilariously over-the-top film – and I mean that in a good way. It’s a movie that is so wild it makes a David Lynch film look like a Hallmark telemovie. To say it is unique would be a vast understatement. Babies are dumped into garbage pails, a woman has a 5 minute orgasm, a man argues with his fish-flopping penis. And what about those camera angles – vagina-cam (shot from inside Jennifer’s vagina, looking out at her first boyfriend just before he kicks her out in fear and disgust); and penis-cam (shot from inside Batz’s pants, as the penis peers out at a hooker). But probably best of all is watching Jennifer giving CPR to the dying detached penis.

The anchor to Henenlotter’s films is his willingness to at least partially address the topic of alienation as faced by those who are different or live with a deformity or defect. I’m sure Henenlotter probably feels this way in regard to the way his mind works.

The low budgets only hurt the finished product with regards to the uneven acting. Danielson is good; Sneed is handsome (and I noticed his name in the credits for creating the masturbation machine) but his delivery needs some work.

Rating: 3 of 4

Other reviewers said:
"The characters and dialogue aren’t quite up there with Henenlotter’s masterworks, Brain Damage and Basket Case, but Bad Biology contains plenty of queasy fun for the depraved at heart."
- Matt McAllister (Total Sci-Fi)

"At once tragically wounded and gloriously shameless, Bad Biology is a must-see for a certain, self-selecting breed of filmgoer. It lives up to the promise of its premise, and extends the career of one of the horror-genre’s most idiosyncratic and most blatantly obsessive artists."
- Jeremy Heilman (MovieMartyr.com)