7. Frank Henenlotter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEXCTFUbF9o Exploitation films have an attitude more than anything else, Frank Henenlotter says, an attitude that you dont find with more mainstream Hollywood productions. Theyre a little ruder, a little raunchier, they deal with material people dont usually touch on. With such films in his blood, Henenlotter made Basket Case (1982), a $35,000 exercise in bad taste dedicated to Herschell Gordon Lewis that he followed up six years later with Brain Damage (1988), your typical drug parable/brain-sucking parasite movie. They established him as one of the most inventive and outrageous directors of the 80s, whose films stood out in a marketplace overcrowded with slasher sequels. Following Frankenhooker (1990) and the Basket Case sequels, Henenlotter took a 15 year sabbatical from directing, in part due to the difficulties in financing such outlandish projects. When he returned with Bad Biology (2008), an everyday tale of a man whose penis leaves his body and attacks numerous showering starlets, it was like hed never been away.
Ian Watson
Ian Watson is the author of 'Midnight Movie Madness', a 600+ page guide to "bad" movies from 'Reefer Madness' to 'Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead.'
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