You know a film still has something, however many years pass, when you consider what would happen to it if it was pitched today. So at a guess, and alongside most of the best horror and exploitation films ever made, a film which involves exploding drug addicts and reanimated hookers via bad science would be unlikely to get a pass – at least, not from anyone with a considerable budget or say-so. This is the very basic plot of Frankenhooker (1990), a film which feels like it nicely rounds off Frank Henenlotter’s period of film releases during the 1980s, albeit that Basket Case 3 was still to follow in 1991. I remember seeing the posters and the video box art for Frankenhooker as a kid, though it was a few years before I got to find out what it was all about. In fact, I’m sure I saw this before I ever saw the ‘classic’ Frankenstein movies made by the likes of Universal or Hammer, so it was a matter of some surprise to me that Boris Karloff didn’t ask the angry locals with pitchforks if they ‘wanted a date’.
Although released in 1990, it’s the 80s spirit of enterprise and a ‘can do’ attitude which leads certain leading men to have a go at science, even though they’ve been outright rejected by the scientific or medical establishments. What cares Herbert West that he’s been shunned? He’s going to uncover the secret of life anyway, and then they’ll all be sorry. Likewise, Frankenhooker’s young protagonist Jeffrey Franken (James Lorinz) hasn’t been dissuaded from trying to master the greatest secrets of human life by the mere fact of being thrown out of several medical schools. (By the way, where the hell does he get that human brain/eyeball combo at the start?) In any case, our ‘bio-electro-technician’ gets his big break when a tragic accident befalls his fiancee, Elizabeth (Patty Mullen).
“A tossed human salad”
Jeffrey has modified the lawnmower which they’ve bought for Elizabeth’s father because of course he has, but a problem with his modifications sends it into fatal collision with Elizabeth, who is brutally dismembered. But rather than think, ‘perhaps I’m not great at this,’ Jeffrey decides he can put Elizabeth back together again using his scientific nous. In fact, if he’s going to achieve this, he decides he might as well make some minor improvements. See, Elizabeth was a little on the large side (the film’s only truly implausible special effect is that unconvincing fat suit) and although Jeffrey had made an attempt to staple her stomach (!) it hadn’t worked. Jeffrey does quite a bit of research on this, if that’s what you can call buying a lot of softcore mags and attaching photos of Elizabeth’s face over the girls’ bodies, but in the end he does what anyone would do: gathers a group of prostitutes for a ‘special party’, where he will choose the nicest bodies ready for Elizabeth v.1.1. This isn’t without precedent, by the way; Victor Frankenstein also scavenges body parts which he considers are aesthetically-pleasing, so Jeffrey Franken is in solid, literary company here. That Jeffrey reaches this conclusion after drilling holes in his own head is neither here nor there. But how will he harvest the body parts he needs?
By adulterating crack cocaine, of course. Once inhaled, it will cause the women to explode. He knows this because he practices on a guinea pig. Although he has a moment of conscience which almost prevents this from happening, gladly it does happen, in one of the most absurd, brilliantly excessive sequences ever filmed. Oh Frank Henenlotter, how we love you for it. But actually getting the parts is only the beginning. Jeffrey next has to assemble them, do the obligatory lightning reanimation thing (as much as a staple of Frankenstein movies as the monster itself) and then hope against hope that his deceased fiancee is mentally coherent and even grateful that he’s rebuilt her out of a panoply of prostitutes’ limbs, all selected because he likes them better than her own! What woman wouldn’t be charmed and flattered, I ask you?
“If they don’t wanna do it they can…just say no!”
Well, more anon. But the new Elizabeth’s first instinct is linked to her new body parts and not her brain. She follows a kind of homing instinct back to Times Square, where she regurgitates words spoken by all of the women who donated her new limbs. This soon brings her to the attention of the girls’ pimp Zorro (Henenlotter regular Joseph Gonzalez) who has been raging over their loss, and wants to find the mysterious ‘Jersey boy’ who somehow blew them up. As Jeffrey desperately tries to steer Elizabeth back home, he has to throw himself into Zorro’s path once more.
Patty Mullen – once a Penthouse Pet – is outrageously good as the modded Elizabeth, lurching and gurning her way through New York to great comedic effect. The re-use of the script in compromising situations is also great in terms of the comedy of errors aspects, and let’s face it – the purple-clad, stitched-up form of Elizabeth has become a modern horror classic image, thanks to a keen eye for a good look as well as Mullen’s fun performance, which only appears at around the hour mark in any case. Good horror monsters don’t need a lot of screen time, they just make the most of it while they’re there. We should give James Lorinz plenty of credit for his performance too, though, as he carries a great deal of the film via his (deadpan) monologue, as well as looking genuinely put upon, albeit by his own crummy decisions. The crux of the film is Jeffrey desperately trying – and failing – to control a series of increasingly bizarre situations. And it’s when Elizabeth recovers her sense of self that he’s really in trouble…
“What I did may have been a bit unorthodox…”
The denouement in this film is essentially a delicious bit of body horror payback; Jeffrey has after all devoted his efforts to an ‘oestrogen-based serum’, which can only be used to resurrect women, so when his head is sadly and brutally detached from his body, he can only be brought back with a woman’s body. Or, bodies, Calling Dr. Freud: it seems that the guy who was hellbent on choosing the sexiest body parts was happiest looking at them from more of a distance, and bemoans his new lack of his ‘johnson’ once Elizabeth has given him a taste of his own medicine. Oh, my. Well, thanks to the easily-understood blueprints and the stock of component parts, as well as a girlfriend who returns the favour, he and Elizabeth can be together again at the end of the film. In what sort of way, ours not to reason why, but there’s a moral of sorts to this tale.
For a film about a hybrid undead prostitute running amok on New York’s streets, and for all that it had an exceptionally modest box office reception, Frankenhooker seems like Henenlotter’s most accessible film of the bunch. Hear me out: regardless of the subject matter, it doesn’t feel quite as skeezy as Basket Case or Brain Damage, despite sharing a lot of shooting locations and being made within a few short years. The NY streets are still sleazy but brighter, less oppressive-feeling somehow, and besides the film veers between there and the leafy suburbia over the bridge, as well as feeling a lot more modern with its TV talk show skits and the Never Say No song, which pokes fun at a lot of late 80s social anxieties. With the exception of what I’ll refer to as the ‘fridge scene’, the body horror is less grotesque here, too; Elizabeth has a few stitches, but otherwise she certainly doesn’t look as grim or warped as Belial or Elmer. It’s also a rather bloodless film, even oddly so, thanks to the novel limb-gathering technology Jeffrey deploys – which cauterises the wounds rather well. The horror overall is overshadowed by what creeps into soft-core territory in places, perhaps giving us a peek at the kind of horror/exploitation ratio Henenlotter most prefers. All in all, Frankenhooker keeps things cartoonish, and never quite as dark as either Basket Case or Brain Damage. It’s very much its own beast with its own laugh-out-loud atmosphere and outlandish, fleshly excess, and it’s yet another enjoyable foray into a world where bodily integrity spoils the fun.