Frank Henenlotter’s first two movies are thematically joined at the hip. Each film revolves around a young man struggling to contain a dark secret that spills over into absurd body horror, and both highlight depravity fueled by separation and withdrawal. That may sound a bit Cronenbergian, but whereas the “king of venereal horror” is coldly serious in his mutated grotesqueries, Henenlotter’s pair of ‘80s cult films takes a far campier tone. The latter filmmaker often presents this lurid material tongue-in-cheek; and in the case of Brain Damage, it’s also worm-in-skull.
In Basket Case (1982), our antihero totes around a monstrously malformed brother tucked away in a locked wicker hamper, and he eventually wrestles with a disturbing telepathic connection to his formerly conjoined twin. The two hole up at a seedy motel in New York City while on a revenge tour against the doctors who dared surgically separate them years prior. Likewise, Henenlotter’s 1988 follow-up, Brain Damage, features a young man named Brian (Rick Hearst) hiding an entity to which he’s become very attached—a phallic-shaped, parasitic alien that gloms onto the back of his neck and shoots a powerful liquid hallucinogen directly into his brain.
The garish absurdity of these tethered scenarios gives each b-movie a similar offbeat charm. With a cucumber-sized body, beady eyes and a voice like Bing Crosby, the goofy-looking alien Aylmer (voiced by John Zacherle) gets his hosts addicted to his “juice,” which he dispenses through a retractable needle-like structure that extends from his toothsome mouth. An elderly couple with a taste for the occult had the centuries-old Aylmer under control for years, feeding him only animal brains from specialty butcher shops to keep him weak enough to remain contained within their bathtub. All the while, they’d been enjoying his juice. So much so that when Aylmer goes missing one day, the two go berserk, wailing and tearing apart their apartment in a desperate search before crumbling to the floor and foaming at the mouth.
Henenlotter wastes no time getting to the point, and when we first meet Brian, he’s already found himself under Aylmer’s influence. Unable to keep a date with his girlfriend because he’s feeling funny, he wakes to find blood on the back of his neck, and soon he’s awash in vivid hallucinations involving bright colors, a ceiling light fixture transforming into an eyeball and the surrounding room filling with an odd blue liquid. After he comes down from this strange trip, he meets Aylmer face-to-face in his bathroom. He’s immediately psyched to get juiced again and runs around the city gleefully marveling at the bright new color spectrum the substance allows him to see, and even eventually to hear.
Problem is, Aylmer only juices Brian to manipulate him, using him as a transport so the alien worm can bore into other people’s skulls and gobble up grey matter. When Brian hops the fence at a local salvage yard, an unfortunate security guard learns this the hard way. Whereas Basket Case’s contorted lump of flesh, Belial, murders out of revenge for compulsory surgical separation and jealousy over his “normal” brother’s burgeoning romantic life, Brain Damage’s Aylmer just wants to eat. All the better that Brian can’t remember any of the gory bits that occur when he’s swept up in his shimmering altered state.
What starts as twisted symbiosis in Brain Damage—where Brian gladly attaches Aylmer to his neck so he can get a shot of juice—turns quickly into taunting parasitism. When Brian finally realizes that people are dying during his amnesiac bouts of psychedelic ecstasy, he shacks up in the familiar Henenlotter setting of a seedy motel and temporarily refuses Aylmer’s juice as a means to prevent the monster from claiming any more victims. But Aylmer knows he has Brian wrapped around his little finger—if he had one—confident that depriving Brian of his highly addictive secretions will leave the juice-junkie a twitching, foaming mess. It’s inevitable that Brian will crack first.
Henenlotter has shared that he prefers to describe his work as “exploitation” rather than “horror,” and that’s an apt description. Both Basket Case and Brain Damage incorporate disturbing combinations of sexualized murder played for laughs, with the latter seeing one unfortunate coquette tell Brian it feels like he’s got a real monster in his pants, only to then find out that’s quite literally true. Though the film is a blatant parallel to drug addiction, Henenlotter doesn’t have anything particularly insightful to say about that topic, instead exploiting it for kooky spectacle.
As a gory romp that doesn’t make you think too hard, Brain Damage makes for an impressive b-movie achievement on a mere $600,000 budget—which must have felt like operating with bottomless pockets compared to what the director was able to do with just $35,000 for Basket Case. The amusing stop-motion creature animation and practical gore effects imbue Brain Damage and its predecessor with an icky quaintness that make them both compelling midnight movies, especially as a double-feature given how thematically similar the films are. In Brain Damage, Henenlotter even works in a cameo for Kevin Van Hentenryck, the lead actor from Basket Case, who, basket in hand, wordlessly plops down on a subway seat near an Aylmer-influenced Brian for a few moments during the film’s tail end. It’s indulgent and pointlessly fun, much like that majority of Henenlotter’s first two films. Strangely enough given the subject matter, accessing these two flicks is only a library card away; both appear on the free library-supported streaming service Kanopy. All that’s stopping you from enjoying these bizarre works is a weak stomach, or perhaps good taste.
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