THE FILM(S) THAT MADE ME - HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER/FEMALE TROUBLE BY BOB FREVILLE

27/1/2022

There were a lot of books and movies that left a permanent impression on my young brain. Angel, Barton Fink, Coffy, The Dark Backward, Do the Right Thing, Evil Dead 2, Fight for Your Life, Hour of the Wolf, Motel Hell, and Mystery Train are a few that immediately spring to mind. But it was a low- budget movie from 1986 that made me think I could make a movie or write a book.

I must have been about twelve years old when I discovered it in the Horror section of Castle Video, a small ma-and-pa rental shop that used to occupy the space now leased by a 50% off card store.

My parents had just moved us to Long Island from Queens. I had no friends, hated school, and missed the city. My only lifeline was Castle Video and the schlocky exploitation movies I discovered therein. It was Castle Video where I would meet C.J. Ramone, the replacement bassist for the punk rock group Ramones, who encouraged me to rent the gloriously un-PC teen musical comedy Rock 'N Roll High School.

It was Castle Video where I would meet my first weed dealer. And it was Castle Video where I developed one of my many boyhood crushes on an older woman (the skanky give-no-fucks barfly that temped as video store clerk for the perpetually absent owners).

It was also the place where I unearthed the VHS cover of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer in one of those weird puffy clam shell videotape cases that all the Mondo movies used to come in; Faces of Death, Mondo Cane, Mondo Trasho--they all had those cases that swallowed your thumbs if you held them too tight. But this one was different. It was obvious right away that this was not another tasteless documentary or no-budget Poverty Row flick.

The cover was black-and-white, except for cobalt blue writing beneath the central photograph, a slogan that desperately read, “He's No Freddy, He's No Jason ... He's REAL.”

What jumped out immediately was how the cover's stark image of a man in a wife beater staring grimly into a medicine cabinet mirror contradicted the gimmicky tag line. This was not some movie monster ... but it was the perfect monster for the Eighties. As I would later learn, 'Henry' was based on Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole, two American drifters and serial killers who were tried and convicted of at least some of the crimes they confessed to.

The real Henry committed his last crime the year that I was born, which made this all the more fascinating to me, but what really stood out was that cover. In the proverbial depths of dingy horror covers, from the cheesy likes of Blood Diner and Return to Horror High (a picture of a literal skeleton in cheerleader garb) to the adorable menace of Critters and Munchies, this solemn-looking picture stood out like a sausage on an all-vegan breakfast platter.

The film itself proved to be just as unique as its cover, and just as bleak. In it, Henry (Michael Rooker in a performance that can best be described as a whistling kettle) is a quiet nomad who travels from lonely city to lonely city, eating himself a meal or buying himself some cigarettes, before murdering those who serve him.

This isn't the intriguing part, but it is the part that likely kept the interest of audiences weened on a steady diet of slasher films. The interest really begins when we meet Otis (the inimitable Tom Towles, who you might remember as the stoic Norman Stoneface in Showtime's Girls in Prison or the ill-fated deputy in House of 1,000 Corpses), a snaggletoothed hilljack and Henry's friend from prison. The two have been living together in squalor ... until Otis invites his sister Becky (Tracy Arnold) to stay with them.

What follows is a series of tense scenes between Henry and Becky and a number of equally alarming scenes of Henry and Otis. Becky would seem to be a catalyst for the rage both of these men harbor and much of the film's more engrossing material concerns Henry's concerted effort to tamp down his violent desire in the face of the seemingly pure Becky.

Despite its shaggy minimalism, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer contains some narrative threads that make for truly great, if simple, storytelling. But that's not what got me as a kid. If I'm being honest, most of what I just described went completely over my head as a teenager.

What stood out at once was the seediness of its design: 'Henry' was a cheap movie by 1986 standards, costing only $100,000 and being lensed on 16mm film, with all footage shot in a single month. The resulting picture is dark, gritty, ugly, and weird. In short, it is all the things that I look for in a good horror movie.

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer made me want to make films that captured some semblance of reality while still telling a bold story. The first time I saw Otis ambling around their apartment in his torn and tattered tightie whities, I thought, “Fuck, man! This feels like I'm hanging out with these losers!”

You get a strong sense throughout the film that you've been invited to spy on the lives of actual degenerates as they go about their day-to-day lives, a sense that is only amplified when Henry and Otis videotape one of their attacks on a family.
After raping the husband and wife and forcing them to watch as they murder their son ... who knows? We only get snatches of the scene from what the boys taped on their stolen camcorder. When they subsequently sit down to watch the footage of their attack it's as if they are watching a video store rental of their own.
This sequence curiously predates Michael Haneke's Funny Games by eleven years (twenty-one years if you only count the American remake), but it plays with the exact same family assault scenario and naked portrayal of all-American voyeurism.

Like I said earlier, most of this shit went over my head at the time, but good art is usually filtered through the subconscious anyway, which explains why I can't watch my Troma film, Hemo, without thinking of the urban destitution of 'Henry.' I owe this one a massive debt, for good or ill.

You could say there were two film experiences that changed me forever--Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and the Dreamland Productions of John Waters.

All of these films share things in common, chief among them the powerful presence of their locations. There are few cliches as tired as the one about how the city is a character in and of itself, but in these films the cliché couldn't be more true--Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is a Downtown Chicago film and John Waters movies are quintessentially Baltimore.

These were the movies I smuggled out of the video store when my parents were preoccupied. They were the films that I sneaked into my bedroom and played on volume so low it forced me to sit with my face practically resting on the television screen. It was my initiation into Taboo, my introduction to a world that I would revel in for the rest of my life.

Multiple Maniacs was the first John Waters film I'd seen that didn't feature a teen heartthrob or a future daytime talk show host, but it had left little impression compared to what was to come. The first time I threw on Female Trouble, I was convinced that I had somehow seen a demented home movie. The degree of set design ingenuity and overall inventiveness was undeniable, but the thing as a whole looked and felt wrong compared to what I'd grown up thinking of as a motion picture. For that reason alone, its existence pleased me to no end.

Watching Divine in male drag rape divine in female drag was a revelation my little brain wasn't prepared for; this level of creative commitment and technical wizardry convinced me that I, too, could make movies. In fact, I would credit this one even more than 'Henry' or Eraserhead with giving me the confidence needed to make my first film.

There has always been something of the fable about Waters' work, as if they all took place in some bizarro world kingdom (like the Mortville of Desperate Living or the rundown movie house from Cecil B. Demented) and we got to be his captive audience. When I was writing my first script (Of Bitches & Hounds), I modeled it after this fabled world and its residents.

The more I think about it, the more I can remember writing an early draft in which all of the characters had names like Francine Fishpaw or Dawn Davenport. That first draft was awful and unusable, of course, because I'm not John Waters ... but his work has always influenced me and I continue to strive to make things that tickle me as much as his films have always tickled me.

This was when movie covers were done right—the box art for Multiple Maniacs made it look like a snuff film, the cover for Desperate Living suggested some obscure training video for how to open the world's scariest leather bar, and the case for Female Trouble topped them both.

It was a tight shot of a mohawked Divine with facial scars, her large frame bound by chains and handcuffs. In the picture, she is staring, wild-eyed, and snarling at someone we cannot see. To her right, we see an image of an overweight hag with a hook for a hand and to her left a full grown woman in a child's dress screwing her face up at the camera.

“In Crime, She's Beautiful, Sadistic, Gross, Vile ... It's Divine!”

How was I supposed to stay away from this? If crack was marketed like a John Waters movie, every fat weirdo teenager in America would be smoking base.

These odd and unforgettable movies showed me just how much a sense of place can mean in the scheme of things. They taught me that a truly unforgettable work of art should be anchored by the physical space that that story inhabits.

Don't believe it? Watch Pink Flamingos and tell me there's another place on earth where a blue-haired David Lochary could go unnoticed tying sausage links around his flaccid cock and flashing them to young ladies. Show me another city where Henry could dump that bloody suitcase without arousing unwanted attention. And tell me where else in the world Waters would have gotten away with building a literal city of trash for his unsung masterpiece, Desperate Living.

This is how I got hooked on regional films and why I continue to seek out obscure examples of shoestring flicks made with all the passion and flare of someone's hometown. In hobbyist terms, this is my Americana.

THE PROUD & THE DUMB BY BOB FREVILLE

Some godless horrors are more unforgivable than others, baseless prejudice and willful ignorance chief among them.

In The Proud & the Dumb, a group of white separatists suspect their friend of being a traitor. After a few seemingly innocent remarks call his blind loyalty into question, the group decides to confirm its suspicions in the only way it knows how - by employing insults and threats.

These nasty threats are met with answers the group is unwilling to confront, answers that lead to a series of increasingly absurd and violent acts.

From author/filmmaker Bob Freville (Battering the Stem; The Network People; Pig Lipstick), The Proud & the Dumb reads like a mutant cross between court room testimony and the worst backyard barbecue banter this side of Hell.

Bob Freville

Bob Freville is an author and filmmaker from Long Island, New York. He is the director of the Berkeley TV cult classic Of Bitches & Hounds, the Troma vampire drama Hemo, and the Vimeo political satire Pig Lipstick. Freville's work has been published by Akashic Books, Bizarro Central, Creem Magazine, Deadman's Tome, Scary Dairy Press, and others. His latest novella, The Proud & the Dumb, is available at godless.com.
Links:

The Proud & the Dumb by Bob Freville – Godless
Amazon.com
Books by Bob Freville (Author of Battering the Stem) (goodreads.com) Bob Freville (@bobfreville) • Instagram photos and videos