Twenty-seven horror films crammed into five days at the Odeon West End. That’s the Film4 FrightFest, a fixture of the August calendar since 2000, providing spilled blood and subtle chills, and promoting genuine engagement with horror as a vital, challenging, necessary mode of discourse in the 21st century. Trends have come and gone – lank-haired Japanese spook ladies, tied-to-a-chair “torture porn”, good-ole-boy cannibals – but the horror film endures.

In the world of FrightFest, there’s as much excitement that Frank Henenlotter (auteur of such defiantly grotty video-era efforts as Basket Case and Frankenhooker) is back with his first film in nearly 20 years as there was at Cannes when Terrence Malick returned from the wilderness. Henenlotter’s Bad Biology shows that some things don’t change: the director still has a knack for creating the most bizarre, yet sympathetic characters – and no idea how to construct a story around them.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article4470334.ece