Frankenhooker (1990) March 4th, 2024

Watching old movies is its own reward, but sometimes I luck out and discover a movie that resonates so deeply with me that I resent not seeing it sooner. I’m pleased to say Frankenhooker joins the esteemed ranks of El Topo and Spider Baby in that esoteric club. Pay no attention to what that might say about my tastes in film!

Frankenhooker is a schlocky take on Mary Shelly’s classic novel Frankenstein. It follows our protagonist Jeffery, a nice boy who dabbles in biological sciences and recently lost his girlfriend to a fatal birthday-party-lawn-mower accident. Don’t laugh, it could happen to anyone! Jeffery is determined to use his anatomic knowhow to reconstitute his beloved from the grave. But where can he find the surplus female body parts necessary to accomplish such a miracle? Send in the hookers.

Jeffery’s motivations are pure of heart but ill of deed as he grapples with the fact that he’ll need to kill several prostitutes to collect enough… raw materials to bring back his dead girlfriend. Jeffery hits a dead end when confronting his personal code of ethics, knowing he couldn’t bring himself to commit murder. Just when he’s about to give up his dream of reuniting with his very mortal beloved, an ingenious idea hits Jeffery like a proverbial bolt of lightning! What’s both fatal and irresistible to hookers in the 90s? Crack.

Before you know it Jeffery’s engineered a new super-crack with a high so extreme it causes its users to combust! If he can get enough hookers to explode themselves with super-crack he’ll get his one true love back, and not technically be a mass murderer, in no time! Faster than a 12-frame dissolve, Jeffery cooks up a gallon bag ziplock of the potent smokeables and brings it to a hotel where he’s arranged to meet with a gaggle of eager street-walkers (I looked it up, that’s the official name for a group of prostitutes). After he’s thoroughly examined ‘the goods’, Jeffery gets cold feet. He’s no killer, he can’t tempt these mostly-innocent women with crystal kryptonite, that would be evil. Unfortunately for these ladies of the evening, tonight is their last. Within minutes the ladies of ill repute sniff out the supercrack and start smoking up a storm. Seconds after ingestion they start exploding left and right in a hilariously edited scene where mannequins stuffed with pyrotechnics explode across this small hotel room. Severed and befishnetted legs fly through the air as Jeffery curses his God given ability to cook the purest of cracks. When the bust settles, Jeffery collects the best bits in a bag and drives them home to build a better girlfriend. From this point on Frankenhooker follows most of the story beats you’d expect while still concealing a few funny surprises.

What can I say? I’m attracted to absurdity and it’s harder to get more absurd than writer/director Frank Henenlotter. In Frankenhooker, Henenlotter elevates the gritty New York City atmosphere he perfected in Basket Case to a new 80’s sex comedy height that’s as close as you can get to Weird Science without getting sued. Bill Paxton not included.

I judged Frankenhooker by its full-frontal cover, expecting a seedy lowbrow excuse for a comedy full of gratuitous nudity and vulgarity. Instead, Frankenhooker is a delightfully surreal lowbrow comedy with gratuitous nudity and a heart of gold. Much like Showgirls, Frankenhooker treats its on-screen nudity transactionally, giving you what you paid for and you didn’t pay it to be pretty. This is a brilliantly subversive way to make an erotically charged movie decidedly unsexy and in doing so expose the viewer to some ugly truths about their own desires and presumptions. That being said, Frankenhooker is a thoroughly enjoyable campy romp through skid row every family is sure to enjoy.