Frankenhooker Blu-ray Review

• 28th Dec 2011

In 1985 Reanimator became a cult classic: a gory, prosthetic and blood filled horror comedy that became an instant cult classic. It meshed comedy and the video nasty perfectly with the zombie and Frankenstein sub-genres to good effect – and still remains a cult classic. Inevitably, similar films were to follow of varying quality. Some worse than others, but mostly all bad. Frankenhooker was one of those. James Henenlotter who had already made a couple of cult horror classics: Basket Case (1982) and Brain Damage (1985) was hired to direct and like his previous two films the premise on paper and the results themselves are ridiculous and over the top as well as daring. He has stated on a number of occasions that the story for the pitch came to him in the producer’s office and completely off the cuff. Henenlotter began working on the film when he brought in Bob Martin, who had just left Fangoria magazine as a former editor – and that’s the way Henenlotter works. He admitted that the experience of making Frankenhooker was a miserable one. Throughout the making of the film he fought constantly with the director of photography, Robert M. Baldwin, as well as putting up with the diva behaviour of lead actor, James Lorinz, and his fights with the strippers, porn stars and small time actresses playing the hookers. Henenlotter enjoyed the story but usually found himself laughing alone with no one else getting the gags and much of the crew taking it all too seriously. By contrast, he was also filming Basket Case 2 back to back with Frankenhooker and the former proved to be a much happier experience for the director.

The story, as it is, centres on Jeffrey Franken, a nerdy inventor working with brains and other bits of machinery and is engaged to a young girl called Elizabeth Shelley (get it? Elizabeth is the heroine from Mary Shelley’s novel and her surname, well you get it…) At a family party Elizabeth (Patty Mullen) is killed and run over by a lawnmower built by Jeffrey, with blood and body parts spewing everywhere. Becoming obsessed with his dead fiancée, Jeffrey wants to bring his beloved Elizabeth back to life and spends time pouring over anatomical drawings in order to transplant her head on another body and hopefully create the perfect woman. He then chooses to cruise the red light district in Manhattan and pick up a series of hookers, pick out the perfect women and kill them using his own concoction of ‘super crack’; he justified these murders by saying to himself that “they’re killing themselves anyway, this just speeds up the process.” He finds a pimp, Zorro who gets a group of prostitutes for Jeffrey to ‘measure’ under the rouse of playing doctors and nurses. Once the prostitutes find the super crack they go wild for the dope and then begin to blow up until the room is filled with body parts. Jeffrey takes the body parts in a plastic bag and sets up the ‘perfect’ body in his lab. After a storm brings his creation back to life (with the other body parts kept in a fridge) she becomes part Elizabeth, but mostly a hooker who recounts the dialogue and makes her way back to the red light district. Jeffrey pursues to try and get his creation back. I don’t want to give the end away for those who do want to see it as this would spoil it!

The results, although a comedy are not that funny. The best part is Mullen when she becomes the creature, distorts her jaw and spews out dialogue from earlier in the film as the prostitute who lumbers about with robotic movements. Some of the make-up effects and special-effects by Gabe Bartalos are pretty good (this is pre-CGI) but less accomplished are the scenes in which people blow up as they are obviously mannequins that have blown up and the body parts are clearly rubber. However, there is not the blood and guts of Reanimator. The nastiest scene, and perhaps one of the most memorable, is when the fridge in Jeffrey’s laboratory comes to life and meshes into a horrible creation of fused body parts which kills Zorro after pursuing Jeffrey back to his lab. The film itself was made on a budget of $2.5 million and its theatrical release only made $205,000. Inevitably where it did make its money back was on the video release, par for the course for horror films in the 80s and 90s. The gimmick that seemed to work quite well for the video release was a button that could be pressed like as on a children’s book that says “wanna date” when pressed. No such gimmick on the latest DVD/Blu-ray release, but it does have lots of extras such as lengthy interviews with the director, the cast and special-effects man, Bartalos. The film is every bit a cult classic to horror aficionados and it is not hard to see why, it is so silly and over the top that it would be irresistible to Fangoria buffs. It is possible that this release will build Frankenhooker into the new wave of cult classic revival that the horror films from the 80s and 90s are beginning receive.

As a coda, curiously in a small part as Jeffrey’s mother is Louise Lasser, the second wife of Woody Allen who had appeared in a number of Woody’s earlier films.

Chris Hick