This upcoming Friday the Kingsway Theatre will be showing a b-movie classic, some love it, most hate it. Ladies and gentlemen, for your viewing pleasure the Kingsway will be playing Frank Henenlotter’s, Frankenhooker.
The film features former Penthouse Pet, Patty Mullen as Elizbeth (The Monster) and is loosely (very) based on Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.
During a BBQ cookout Elizabeth is accidentally killed in a freak lawnmower accident in which her body is cut to pieces. Heartbroken, her boyfriend Jeffery, who is a med-school dropout, begins to use the body parts of New York’s ladies of the night (wink). He lures said ladies of the night back to a party where they ingest a form of super crack and explode.
Jeffery uses the exploded hooker parts to rebuild his girlfriend piece by piece and with the help of a convenient lightening storm manages to re-animate her. There’s just one slight problem, her mind isn’t quite all it once was. Jeffery’s creation escapes and begins “working” the streets of New York (muscle memory, I guess…) where, after enlisting her services, Elizabeth’s clients explode as a residual result of the super crack. Meanwhile, things get a bit more complicated for Jeffery as Zorro, the missing prostitute’s pimp, comes around looking for his employees.
This movie is absolutely batshit!! The fondness that Henenlotter has for the genre clearly shines through. Frankenhooker is quite clearly a tribute to the old grindhouse/exploitation movies and inadvertently a farewell to a bygone time.
The film was made at a time when central New York was going through a major cleanup and two eras kinda clashed. 42nd street, for example, which was infamously known for its sex shops, porn theatres, drug dealers and sex workers was slowly changing into a more tourist friendly area with camera shops and fast food restaurants. This is captured a few times in the film as Frankenhooker is coming out of a subway to camera flashes from tourists carrying shopping bags.
Frankenhooker opened in April of 1990 at the Houston International Film Festival. The film was delayed from it’s intended release date as there was some difficulty in obtaining a proper rating. Although it opened to relatively positive reviews, Bill Murry was quoted as saying “if you only see one movie this year, it should be Frankenhooker”, the film only managed to recoup $205, 000 of it’s $2.5M budget.
Some other films by the same director/writer which are equally as insane and worth a viewing are: the Basket Case trilogy in which a relatively normal looking guy seeks revenge against the people who separated his freakishly deformed, conjoined brother from him. Also, worth checking out is Brain Damage, rather than spoil it with any sort of synopsis, I suggest you go into this one blindly. I promise you won’t be disappointed.
