Horror, Sleaze and Trash.

So Cannes is going on right now. Lots of people whose lives are inextricably bound up with the fortunes of the film industry are over in the South of France, lounging around on yachts, figuring out what movies are going to be making us cry into our duvets when they turn up on Netflix in a few months time, and watching Pete Doherty say pretentious things in an incredibly boring way.

One person who isn't there right now, and who is probably never likely to discuss the merits of Up the Bracket on an expensive boat, is Frank Henenlotter, director of such sexploitation classics as Basket Case, Brain Damage, and Frankenhooker. I saw the first couple a while back, and though I was impressed, it wasn't until my eyes feasted on the majestic latter that I came well and truly under his spell.

I couldn't find a decent interview with the man anywhere online, so I decided to do one myself. Frank is in the middle of filming a documentary about sexploitation, and I caught up with him on a day off from being surrounded by naked women for a chat about that and his life.

VICE: Hey Frank. So, tell us a bit about the documentary you're filming at the moment.
Frank Henenlotter: We started it about two years ago. It's called That's Sexploitation and it's 40 years of the non-Hollywood sexploitation underbelly.

That's with the Something Weird Video crowd, right?
Oh yeah. Mike Vraney [from Something Weird] and I spent about a year just picking clips. We didn't want wack material. We didn't want a couple in bed, just grinding. Boring! What we want are those shots where you have a naked woman standing in a living room wearing a scuba mask and fins. Yeah. It's like, "What the HELL were they thinking?" Or, a very plump young lady, lying in bed—she's reading before she goes to sleep. Now that's fine, but she's reading a book on the Winchester rifle. And then she falls asleep and when she wakes up, there's all these artfully shot close-ups of plastic cowboys and indians covering her body.

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