Director: Frank Henenlotter
Screenplay: Frank Henenlotter, Robert Martin
Starring: James Lorinz, Patty Mullen, Louise Lasser, Joseph Gonzalez
Release Date: 1990
Today’s SIHS entry is a bit of a cheat, as I actually did see FRANKENHOOKER once about twenty years ago when it aired on Cinemax. I distinctly remember this because I had to ask my mom what the title of the movie was, and when she told me I then asked her to explain to me what a hooker was. Why that conversation didn’t end with her immediately turning the TV off and sending me to bed I’ll never know, but I do know that I stayed in my parents bedroom by myself for the next hour and a half and watched this thoroughly inappropriate flick through to the end. So why am I reviewing it for this blog? Well, for starters I’ve been sitting on the DVD for over three years now and really wanted to watch it. But honestly, twenty years is a long-ass time to go without seeing a movie, especially one that I was far too young to understand, so I think it’s safe to say that this is the first time I’ve REALLY taken in everything this demented spoof of the Frankenstein story has to offer.
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| What constitutes as "normal" behavior in this movie. |
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| Damn! Check out the pyramidalus on her! Giggity! |
FRANKENHOOKER tells the story of Jeffrey Franken (Lorinz), a medical school dropout who now works for the New Jersey Gas and Electric company and by night dabbles in the field of “mad science“. Everything seems to be working out for him. He’s got a sweet one-eyed brain monster that he keeps in a cylinder in his mother’s kitchen and an adorable fiance named Elizabeth, a slightly overweight Jersey girl who is obsessed with her body image. During a birthday party for her father, Elizabeth is killed in a horrific accident involving a remote-controlled lawn mower designed by Jeffrey that rends here limb from limb. After a quick fade to black, we pick up several months later as Jeffrey sits in his bedroom working on a diagram of the female anatomy, desperately developing a formula to bring his beloved back to life. Before the coroner arrived, Jeffrey was able to make off with a few of Elizabeth’s body parts, namely her head, a foot, a toe, and one hand, all of which he keeps suspended in an estrogen-based blood serum sealed inside a filthy storage freezer. Jeff just needs to come up with 1600 volts of power to spark Elizabeth back to life, and a severe storm is predicted to pass through Ho-ho-kus, New Jersey in two days. As much as he wants to be reunited with his fiance, he has also developed an unhealthy obsession with supplying her with the perfect body, and after drilling a hole into his skull for inspiration (like you do), decides to obtain the parts he needs from the prostitutes of New York City‘s Times Square. They’re already selling their bodies, so why not go see what’s on the market?
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| He must have learned this trick from Egon Spengler. "That almost worked, Venkman!" |
James Lorinz totally owns the first two thirds of this movie, delivering a manically schizophrenic portrayal of Jeffrey that swings back and forth between garnering our sympathy and earning our disgust at his objectification of the female form. There’s something about his lazy line delivery and thick Jersey accent heard here and in another 80’s classic, STREET TRASH, that lends his characters a charming, everyman quality that makes him easy to identify with, even while he plots to obtain hooker-parts by killing off prostitutes with a highly volatile form of “Supercrack”. “I’m not killing anybody!”, he reasons. “I’m merely gonna place a lethal form of crack in their presence. They don’t have to take it!”
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| "Supercrack": It's what's for dinner.....and breakfast and lunch. |
So Jeffrey hits up Times Square and sets up a party with a score of prostitutes after a meeting with their pimp, a huge Italian bodybuilder named Zorro, in a skuzzy bar that looks to be a genuine crack den. One thing I definitely enjoy about all of Henenlotter’s films is his fondness for shooting in real seedy locations, using authentically crazy bastards he happened to encounter on the streets as extras. All of his movies act as a sort of time capsule of a grimy version of New York that simply no longer exists, probably for the better. One gets the impression while watching the scenes set in the bar that Lorinz and the rest of the cast are in very real danger of being caught in the middle of a police raid. So anyways, Jeffrey gets a group of about ten girls to have a party with him, which turns out to be less of a party and more of a chance for Jeffery to take their measurements in order to determine which parts he needs, and from whom.
Eventually the girls get impatient waiting on him to pay them, so they snatch his briefcase and start digging through, eventually discovering Jeffrey’s enormous bag of “Supercrack”, at which point they all freak the fuck out and engage in a psychotic crack-smoking orgy. Unfortunately for them, the “Supercrack” rapidly raises their body temperatures to insane levels, resulting in a glorious montage of exploding hookers that goes on for at least five minutes and features an amazing shot that follows the POV of dismembered leg as it flies straight across a room and slams into a wall that shall henceforth be known as “high-heel cam”. Hearing the commotion, Zorro rushes up to the hotel room just in time to be knocked unconscious by the projectile head of one of his exploding bitches.
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You didn't honestly think I'd pass up the chance to include a photo of an exploding prostitute, did you?
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In my opinion the movie could have ended here and I would have been completely satisfied, so awestruck was I by the sheer misogynistic lunacy and utter lack of taste on display. But Jeffrey still has to bring Elizabeth back to life, so he collects all of the body parts in a trash bag and takes them back to his laboratory in his garage, stitching together a body for Elizabeth using hooker-parts he deems the most desirable, at one point even rummaging through a pile of severed breasts to decide which he likes the best. With the body all stitched up, he straps Elizabeth to a gurney, opens up the sunroof to his lab, and raises her up into the raging thunderstorm to be struck by lightning in true Frankenstein fashion. What comes down, however, isn’t the Elizabeth Jeffrey hoped for, but instead a ghastly walking corpse with awkward facial twitches, decked out in a tiny purple mini-skirt with purple hair who immediately knocks him the fuck out and staggers out into the night screaming “Wanna date?! Ya feelin’ lonely?! Ya got any money?! ”
From here on out FRANKENHOOKER follows the typical formula of the Frankenstein formula, with Jeffrey running through Times Square in an attempt to find his ungodly creation while she strolls and struts through the sleaziest parts of New York causing every man she hooks up with to explode with any sexual contact as a result of being infused with Jeffrey’s “Supercrack”. Patty Mullen is great as the titular Frankenhooker, all rubbery facial twitches and spastic, slightly retarded line readings. It is an piece of physical comedy that single-handedly saves the film’s final act from just being a bunch of standard death scenes. Eventually the pimp Zorro recognizes that Elizabeth is made entirely of parts of his “bitches”, leading to a final confrontation at Jeffrey’s laboratory that ends with a nice, moist decapitation for one character, and another character being dragged into a freezer by mutant vagina/tit monsters comprised of leftover reanimated hooker parts. |
| This face is probably my favorite thing in the whole movie. |
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| FRANKENHOOKER brings a whole new meaning to the phrase "giving head". |
The long and short of it is, this movie is fucking amazing, a brazenly tacky and witty spoof of the horror genre, taking the objectification and degradation of women the genre has always been accused of by critics to such heretofore unseen over-the-top extremes that anybody who takes the filmmakers seriously really needs to have their head examined. The rampant sexism and misogyny on display is balanced out by the fact that the male characters who partake in such reprehensible behavior all get exactly what is coming to them by the time the credits roll. I like it when my trashy B-grade gore fests have a message, but more importantly I like it when they do a good job of getting that message across. The only other film of Frank Henenlotter’s that I have enjoyed was BRAIN DAMAGE, a similarly tasteless movie that works on several levels, as a gory splatter comedy and also as an allegory for drug addiction. Both movies exhibit a level of creativity with their ideas and special effects, and a willingness to go places most movies tend to ignore, that I feel is sorely missing from his BASKET CASE series, or at least from the sequels. Whereas BASKET CASE 2 & 3 felt like uninspired cash-grabs, BRAIN DAMAGE and FRANKENHOOKER are clearly the products of someone with a very vivid, comically twisted imagination who has a lot to say about some very uncomfortable subjects. I should also make special mention of the contributions of special make-up effects artist Gabe Bartalos, who does a fine job of bringing Henenlotter’s fucked-up visuals to life. None of it looks real, mind you, but the fact that someone attempted to film a scene in which a man is attacked by a boob monster made up of exploded hooker parts is enough to earn him major kudos in my book.
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| I think it's safe to say that this is EXACTLY what it looks like. |
FRANKENHOOKER is like a filthy joke your drunken Uncle tells you at Christmas dinner after having a bit too much eggnog. It is incredibly inappropriate, crass, juvenile, amoral, and so wickedly funny you can’t wait to tell your demented friends about it as soon as you get the chance. I have no fucking clue how the hell I got away with watching this flick at the tender age of five. For some reason my memory blocked out all of the nudity and grisly details, so either I saw a cut version or I couldn’t handle it and blocked it out. Whatever the case, this is definitely one to put on after throwing back a case of beer, and I can’t wait to watch it with a few of my feminist friends to see how they react. My prediction is “not well”, but fuck it man, this is a great, cheesy-ass movie and I won’t apologize to anyone for enjoying it.
My Rating:
8/10
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