This is the infamous exploding hookers movie.
Jeffrey Franken is a young man living in New Jersey with his mom. He’s engaged to a sweet girl, Elizabeth. Jeffrey is a failed med student who works for the power company and likes to tinker with gadgets. Gadgets such as a remote-controlled lawnmower which runs amok and slices Elizabeth into little pieces.
Most guys would go through a period of grieving after something like this. But not Jeffrey. He thinks he can fix her. OK, all he has to work with is her head but it’s a start.
He has his own mad scientist laboratory, which looks great because it looks exactly like the kind of mad scientist laboratory that a guy would build in his garage.
He’s going to need some female body parts.
And he has a brainwave. Working girls. Hookers. They sell their whole bodies. Or rather they rent them out. If he could get hold of some hookers so that he would have a choice of body parts he could not only give Elizabeth a new body, it could be a perfect body. The best legs. The nicest hands. The best posterior. And the best breasts.
Jeffrey will need to be at his best to carry out some very advanced surgical techniques but he has found a way to enhance his intellectual skills, by means of drilling holes in his own skull.
To convince the hookers to co-operate he manufactures a large quantity of super-crack. This stuff is dynamite. Literally.
The hooker idea doesn’t work and then again it does work. He didn’t think there’d be such a mess but then he’s never seen girls explode before. But at least now he has lots of body parts.
Now we get a major homage to the 1931 Frankenstein movie with the roof of the garage opening so that the electricity necessary to provide the vital spark of life can be provided by lightning.
There’s another homage to the 1931 movie, with a twist. In that movie things went wrong when the monster had a criminal’s brain implanted by mistake. In this case Jeffrey finds out that if you construct the perfect woman from hookers you’ll end up with a super-hooker. A Frankenhooker!
It’s a sleazy movie in very poor taste (with plenty of T&A) and it doesn’t care and if you can be offended by a movie as goofy as this you should seek professional help. And if you’re looking for ideological underpinnings here then it’s too late for professional help to do any good.
It’s also, in its own way, a sincere tribute to the great horror movie tradition. Henenlotter assumes you’ve seen and loved the 1931 movie and if you haven’t then you’ll miss many of Frankenhooker’s cleverest moments.
And it’s a love story. OK, a deranged love story, but you have to admire Jeffrey’s devotion. His girlfriend has been reduced to hamburger meat but that doesn’t stop him from loving her.
Given the movie’s tone there was no reason to agonise over getting the special effects to look realistic. Realistic special effects would have made this movie unpleasant instead of fun. And making even the slightest attempt to make the science stuff make sense would have spoilt things. Frankenhooker glories in its silliness.
I like James Lorinz as Jeffrey. He doesn’t go overboard but he has a wonderful intense crazed look. Patty Mullen is fun as both Elizabeth and Frankenhooker.
Frankenhooker is totally nuts and and absurdly outrageous and I enjoyed it a lot. Highly recommended.
I have the French Blu-Ray which looks great.
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