It's Brian's simple misfortune to have an apartment just down the hallway from the elderly couple with the vast collection of African artifacts and the brainsucking parasite swimming in their bathtub. When said parasite - a big sperm-shaped creature named Aylmer (which stands for "the awe-inspiring famous one,") - escapes the duo's apartment, he doesn't have to venture far for his next sucker. For Aylmer (or "Elmer") is capable of injecting an addictive hallucinogenic blue liquid directly into his host's brain, to get them to do his bidding. Once he has Brian (Rick Herbst) hooked, he gets the poor stoned-out-of-his-mind sap to carry him out into the New York City night in search of fresh brains to devour.
So it goes in Frank Henenlotter's Brain Damage (Synapse Films), the writer-director's 1988 typically gory and idiosyncratic follow-up to Basket Case. A parable about drug use (possibly), Damage contains plenty of the director's trademark sick humor, imaginative use of low-budget fx and over-the-top violence. His monster, Aylmer, speaks with the rolling tongue of a teevee horror show host. When he feasts on his first victim, an auto graveyard guard, he pronounces the meal, "Not bad, a bit underdone." Taking a fucked-up Brian to an 80's dance club called Hell (as with Basket Case, the flick really conveys the period look of its New York neighborhoods), he picks up a clubgoer for some back alley oral sex. What follows ("Feels like you've got a real monster in there," the hapless young girl notes before undoing Brian's zipper) is a monumental scene of horror film perversity, the kind of moment you might've gotten in 70's underground horror comix (Skull, for instance) but even more startling for the flashes of soft porn imagery Henenlotter incorporates.
Article comments
1 - Jim Carruthers
Of Henenlotter's movies, I have a special place for "Frankenhooker", mostly because one of the local video stores (Suspect Video) had a talking VHS box. You'd press a button on the case, and it would say: "wanna date?".