Frankenhooker is a top-tier B-grade horror comedy, celebrated for its chaotic, darkly humorous take on mad science and gore, writes WILLIAM BOVE
TITLE: Frankenhooker
RELEASED: 1990
DIRECTOR: Frank Henenlotter
CAST: James Lorinz, Patty Mullen, Joanne Ritchie, Paul-Felix Montez, Joseph Gonzalez, J.J. Clark
Review of Frankenhooker 1990
They say nothing can stop love – not even a high-powered automatic lawnmower at a birthday party. Which, in fact, did not stop love. It just tried to turn it into mulch – a pile of bloody flesh that chewed and eviscerated love. All except for the head of Elizabeth Shelley, played by Patty Mullen (former Penthouse Pet of the Month 1986, later becoming Pet of the Year 1988). The love of Jeffrey Franken’s life, played by James Lorinz, the fun-loving, atomically inclined, bioelectrically talented scamp. Like any good mad scientist in bloom, you can’t keep a good re-animator down.
Frankenhooker – this wonderful genius of a movie and my absolute favourite B-horror movie comedy – came to us in 1990, directed by Frank Henenlotter. The name sounds a lot like Frankenhooker, doesn’t it? The movie, much like the names of the characters, is full of homages to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, written in 1818. Jeffrey Franken – a nod to Frankenstein – and his love Elizabeth Shelley – a nod to Mary Shelley.
Although I think this movie would have come as quite a shock to the original author. The rest of the cast gives an all-out star performance, as one zany antic leads to the next, culminating in every gruesome and gory, electrified massacre – all in the name of love. Once Jeffrey starts, he just can’t stop.
There is no amount of stress that poor Jeffrey does not go through. To ease the tension, he drills little holes into his head to help him think clearly and plan his next move. This process is called trepanning, and is used to treat health problems or release the build-up of blood pressure caused by an injury. It’s often said that love hurts, and for Jeffrey, it literally does.
Leave it to Jeffrey to bore his problems away by creating “burr” holes to explore an easier lifestyle for himself. He sure isn’t short of a “burr” in his saddle. This dark comedy hit everyone right where it counts, never missing a chance to tickle, drill, and hit the funny bone. Frankenhooker is really the “sluts and bolts” of B-horror comedy.
While Jeffrey couldn’t save his love’s heart, he definitely managed to save her head. He went to work right away to gather all the parts he needed to build the perfectly imperfect body for Elizabeth so that she may live again. And they called him mad—mad, they said. Well, he’ll show them. He’ll show all the prostitutes in New York, which is where Jeffrey thought he would build his new Elizabeth from.
Bringing with him a batch of his special “super crack”, Jeffrey tries to lure a group of prostitutes into a situation to save his fallen love. Unfortunately, and against all of Jeffrey’s protests, the hookers smoke away all the “super crack”, which gives them all the superhuman power of exploding one after the other, raining bloody body parts all over the place—a mess that won’t sit well with Zorro, the “kindly” pimp who gave Jeffrey the girls in the first place. Well, Zorro turns out to be neither kindly, but he is very much a pimp.
And not a friend Jeffrey wants to make. Seeing his chance, Jeffrey stuffs what remains of the girls into the bag he brought, then tears out of the scene, making his way home to reconstruct the love of his life. Which he does. Lightning from a nearby storm, coupled with a lot of electricity, returns Jeffrey’s love to him. She wakes up and is happy to see Jeffrey, but then becomes very unhappy to find she is made of a mismatch of parts from all the hookers Jeffrey accidentally did away with.
Before long, Elizabeth is spouting beautiful lines of verse to her long-lost love: “Got any money?” “Want a date?” The other hookers begin to take poor Elizabeth over, setting her on the path to do what the hookers did best – look for love in all the wrong places. Jeffrey doesn’t know what to do. Elizabeth’s upset. She needs to leave. And she does, tearing out into the night to turn tricks with the best of them. And of course, Elizabeth is made of the best of them… literally.
Not using all the parts to make his love, Jeffrey tosses the rest into a freezer like refuse—a freezer which holds all the leftover re-animator juice that he has. While all the girls are in the freezer collaborating on what to do next, Elizabeth hits bars, subways, and every guy she can find looking for a good time. Which turns out to be a shocking experience because whenever Elizabeth gets supercharged with an orgasm, she does her electrical best to fry her johns with a lot of electricity. Not that she means to, it’s just how her Franken-body reacts to a good time.
Jeffrey, very distraught, decides he needs to find Elizabeth, which he does in a bar – a bar that Zorro frequents. Zorro is starting to put two and two together and comes up with a lot of dead hookers. He becomes angered and attacks Elizabeth, knocking her head nearly off. Jeffrey escapes and returns home with Elizabeth, where he fastens her together again, gives her a good jolt, and has his beloved back again.
Her memory is returned, and so has Zorro – meaner than ever and seeking revenge. He attacks once again, and in all the excitement, it is Jeffrey who now loses his head. Zorro, feeling triumphant, wants all his girls back, so he’s going to take them out of Elizabeth. Just then, the girls in the freezer all decide (all decide as one amalgamation) to come out and attack Zorro, whom they pull inside the freezer for safekeeping.
Since you just can’t stop true love, Elizabeth decides that she cannot live without Jeffrey. And who could blame her? So, she creates a new female body for Jeffrey and attaches his head to his new form. Jeffrey wakes up and realises what Elizabeth has done. His outpouring of love is both moving and tender, or it would be if he wasn’t so completely horrified by his new makeover. But look at it this way – now they both have a place on the New York strip. Love triumphs anew, even if you have to electrify it a few times to get it to live again.
Two fun facts I will leave you with about Frankenhooker: most of the prostitutes were not actresses – they were real New York hookers. And the second: there is a scene with a collection of tools. These tools were used by Jeffrey Dahmer, who was very alive and well at the time. Want a date…
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