Frankenhooker

Frank Henenlotter's Frankenhooker (1990) is a funny horror comedy starring James Lorinz as Jeffrey Franken, a young man who is extremely interested in medical studies and becoming a doctor. He makes his weird experiments in his house while his parents are little concerned as they think their son is little weird, understandably. Soon a horrible but incredibly comical accident happens to his girlfriend Elizabeth so Jeffrey takes all the body parts he can in order to re-build his girl. But he needs various body parts in order to complete his love and he develops a drug which makes its users explode. He goes to the streets searching for prostitutes and you know what he wants from them. He gets the parts, but will the new Elizabeth, Frankenhooker, be the same as she used to be?

This film is a must for lovers of B cinema and films which mix horror, gore and comedy. Franken's character is very mad as he talks alone all the time and inserts a power drill into his head everytime he is about to have some nervous problems under pressure. Usually when characters talk all the time without reasons in films it just shows how bad the script is, but in this case, the talking (especially for himself) is normal for this kind of crazy doctor and thus it doesn't feel irritating and bad choice.

Henenlotter's other films like Brain Damage (1988) and Basket Case (1982) are so fantastic as they mix humor and horror so uniquely. They are creepy and very funny (and clever especially in Brain Damage's case) at the very same film. Frankenhooker isn't an exception and the first lawnmower scene convinces the viewer what will the film be like. There are many severed limbs and body parts, but they don't seem repellent as the tone of the film is so tongue in cheek and not wicked. The scene in which some ten hookers EXPLODE is as funny as possible, but not gory at all, since the film had to get an R rating. It is even funnier now as crimson doesn't fly all the time, they just explode!

The mutants and attached body parts at the end are really creepy and almost nightmarish, and reminded me of Brian Yuzna's Bride of Re-Animator which has similar monsters. The effects work in Frankenhooker is fantastic all the way, and it all is now perfect, and wouldn't work anymore if done with computers or CGI. The pace is fast all the time and the viewer doesn't get bored. The Frankenhooker herself is also pretty outrageous and very deadly a hooker! The lady who plays her part is very talented with all her face expressions and movements. I like Basket Case and Brain Damage even more, but still Frankenhooker is a little classic by this talented and mad film maker genius. I give Frankenhooker at least 8/10 now after the first viewing.

It is a frightening as well as ironical movie with violent, offbeat , unpleasant events, including lots of blood and gore and resulting to be disappointing at times , but entertaining as well. A contemporary and tongue-in-cheek Frankenstein version, inspired by Mary Shelley's classic novel. Jeffrey Franken (James Lorinz) is a nice guy, he didn't mean to mow his fiancee (Patty Mullen) down on the front lawn. Jeffrey lives with her mother (Louis Lasser) while makes experiments. Jeffrey, nerdy would-be Frankenstein, as a laboratory guinea pig explodes after inhaling fumes from his patented Super-Crack. But sometimes bad things just happen to good people and an accident gos wrong. After the brutal and sudden killing of his girlfriend, he embarks on a dangerous journey to bring him back to life, though the results aren't entirely successful. Then he creates Frankenhooker, the girlfriend with more than a heart. Luckily Jeff thought to save her head and decides to pair it up with the body of sexy streetwalkers. Revived by the obligatory bolt of lightning, Elizabeth is not quite old self, even her clients find her too hot to handle. A series of circumstances have led her to become a mad scientist capable of resurrecting bodies and making them a monstrous extension of all the rage and frustration that he has had to live and is having to live. A terriffying tale of prostitutes and bolts !. Death can be cured!

Typical Frankenstein plot adding a lot of comical set pieces, lurid images, much nudism and gory scenes: when his bride-to-be is turned into a tossed salad by a runaway lawnmower, Jeffrey salvages her head and reconstructs her with breasts, torsos and limbs gleaned from hookers he has tricked into cracking up in similar fashion . Director Frank Henenlotter indulges his penchant for sleaze to the max, throwing in a few bad-taste puns and a little therapeutic head-drilling for laughs. The resulting fragmented mess will no doubt keep some in stitches, but it is definitely less than the sum of its body parts. A contemporary Frankenstein that examines, through terror and humor, the brutalities, vices, horrors, corruption and sleaziness in New York in the nineties. Prostitution

The film is somewhat reminiscent of the much better ¨Deadly Friend¨ (1986) by Wes Craven also with a teenager from a simple suburban neighborhood who creates a kind of Frankenstein for his own purposes and the recent ¨The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster¨(2023) by Bomani J. Story . Although perhaps this ¨Frankenhooker¨ has more to do with Stuart Gordon's ¨Reanimator¨ and ¨The bride of Re-Animator¨

The motion picture was mediocrely written/directed by Frank Henenlotter. Rescued low budget pictures and put them out on his Frank Henenlotter's Sexy Shockers From The Underground label for Something Weird Video. Regarding his labeling as a horror film director, Frank said the following: ¨I never felt that I made "horror films." I always felt that I made exploitation films. Exploitation films have an attitude more than anything else -- an attitude that you don't find with mainstream Hollywood productions. They're a little ruder, a little raunchier, they deal with material people don't usually touch on, whether it's sex or drugs or rock and roll¨. Frank Henenlotter is known for Basket Case I, II and III, Bad Biology (2008), Brain Damage (1988) , Chasing Banksy (2015) and Frankenhooker (1990). Frank also made documentaries, such as: That's Sexploitation! (2013) Herschell Gordon Lewis: The Godfather of Gore (2010). Frankenhooker (1990) rating: 5/10. Only for gore with drops of humor enthusiasts.

Frankenhooker is without a doubt one of the most stupid, ridiculous, moronic, pointless, fun and brilliant films that I have seen. From the film's opening; which sees our would-be hero working on a strange brain with an eye in it, with some ridiculously out of place, relaxed suburbia music playing in the background; I knew that I was in for a comic treat. This movie features several moments of delicious comic brilliance; such as the out of control lawnmower sequence that sees the central character's girlfriend get tragically murdered, to the rather tactless news report detailing said tragedy, to the exploding whores and all the way down to the weather report which details a storm that is coming, "for all you mad scientists out there"; there's plenty to make you laugh in Frankenhooker.

The film takes obvious influence from the classic Frankenstein story, and it should appeal to anyone that is a fan of cheesy 80's gorefests. Of course, this was released in 1990, but that's incidental. As mentioned, the main character's girlfriend is killed in a lawnmower accident. The accident itself is a comic masterpiece; it's so absurdly silly! Anyway, this accident leads our hero to the brink of madness (to which his mother responds to by asking him if he would like a sandwich), and he decides to make his girlfriend a new body from the parts of various prostitutes that he picks up. Of course, it doesn't quite go to plan, which leads him into all manner of weird troubles. James Lorinz takes the lead role of Jeffrey Franken (and his girlfriend's surname is Shelly...can you spot the tribute?). Lorinz is great as the hero for the movie, he spends a lot of it acting on his own and he more than holds the audience's interest with his speeches and great accent. A film like this needs an offbeat star; and it has one in Lorinz.

Overall, this terrifying tale of sluts and bolts is sheer comic brilliance, and if you're a fan of weird and wonderful cult films, and even if you're not; you won't want to miss Frankenhooker.

Zorro is a beefed up super pimp, who goes around kicking ass and taking names. Zorro, and Jefferey's invention of "Supercrack" are the two things that make this movie hilarious. "No,no,no,no the question is who are you, and from what I've been hearing, your ass is mine and I'm taking possesion right now" " My girls are the best, the best to look at, the best for fun. You want the best, you gotta pay." " No no no no, they didn't leave, they didn't go nowhere, they just blew up. F***ing exploded, one minute they my bitches, and the next minute, pieces all over" These are all quotes from the man Zorro.

If they could use Mary Shelley's novel "Frankenstein" for "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" (1975), among other bizarre iterations, then I don't see why not have a mad scientist re-animate his girlfriend with the leftover parts of prostitutes who exploded from lethal doses of crack cocaine. Moreover, after seeing fellow Frankenstein exploitation flick "Flesh for Frankenstein" (1975), it's difficult to be shocked by such a premise as that of "Frankenhooker."

The mad scientist here is a young man named Jeffrey Franker who lives with his parents and creates his hooker monster in their garage. He has a brain with an eyeball in it that he experiments with in the house, and he uses an electric drill to literally prod his brain to come up with good ideas. It's no wonder he didn't finish med school. His garage laboratory is essentially what one would expect from generations of Frankenstein films following in the footsteps of the original design of the 1931 version, full of gizmos, beakers and the spark of life from a lightning bolt. To this, Jeffrey adds his estrogen-based blood serum, which keeps the body parts fresh. Jeffrey's girlfriend, whose name Elizabeth Shelley is a combination of the names of Dr. Frankenstein's wife from the novel and of the author of that novel, is torn to pieces by a runaway lawn mower. Jeffrey preserves what he can of her in his serum and seeks to remake the rest of her out of the body parts of prostitutes. He kills these women with an especially lethal crack formula of his own design, which causes them to explode.

It may seem pointless to analyze a film such as this, which was clearly intended to be goofy and trashy fun not to be taken seriously. But, its overriding joke regarding the objectification of women is asking for it. From the start, Elizabeth is shamed for her supposed excess weight. Jeffrey plays doctor with the prostitutes to find the best bits for her re-animated corpse--grading the women on their arms, legs and breasts and writing a check mark on his preferred buttocks. The prostitutes are stereotyped as only wanting money and drugs. I'm sure film theorists of the Freudian-Feminist, Laura Mulvey persuasion could and probably already have had a field day with this one. To top it off, the film's conclusion, as poetic justice, is a literal realization of castration anxiety. I'd like to sit in on a film theory class that screened "Frankenhooker," as opposed to old chestnuts such as the male gaze of "Rear Window" (1954). Freudian film theory, after all, already always has me rolling my eyes and chuckling--something "Frankhooker" does just as well.