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Brothers "really doing New York in style," a touching fable. One is a bumpkin (Kevin Van Hentenryck), the other is a lump of latex, fanged and clawed and mad as hell—the two are born conjoined and separated in a surgery scored to pipe organ and what sounds like cracked celery. The youngster ventures into the big city with misshapen sibling inside a wicker creel, the "squashed octopus" lives on hamburgers and hot dogs until it's unleashed on the doctors responsible for the operation, "old friends of the family." The kooky receptionist (Terri Susan Smith) wins the lad's heart with her impression of a squeaky typewriter, but the brothers are a telepathically-sutured id duo: When the "normal" one touches his girlfriend's bosom, the monstrous one pops shrieking out of its hiding place. "So what's in the basket? Easter eggs?" The Hunchback of Notre Dame plus It's Alive, set in the Manhattan of The Driller Killer and the year of E.T. the Extraterrestrial, quite the wondrous mash from Frank Henenlotter. The bloodbath has its primal side, the rejected creature reaches out from inside a garbage bag to pursue revenge (the father's legs topple toward opposite sides of the frame after he meets a giant buzzsaw), the aunt cares for the outcasts by reading Caliban's words in a rocking chair ("When I wak'd, I cried to dream again"). Herschell Gordon Lewis is the dedicatee, Little Shop of Horrors figures in the putty creature out of the bowl, glowing eyes over the cityscape recall Mayo's Svengali. "Is this what I have to worry about every time I find a girl I like?" It ends tragically and uproariously, in the gutter on a splatter of fraternal sorrow. With Beverly Bonner, Robert Vogel, Diana Browne, Lloyd Pace, Bill Freeman, Richard Pierce, and Ruth Neuman.
--- Fernando F. Croce |