Horror in the 90s: 'Frankenhooker'

Frankenhooker (1990)

Directed by Frank Henenlotter

Written by Robert 'Bob' Martin, Frank Henenlotter

Starring James Lorinz, Patty Mullen, Louise Lasser

Release Date April 1990

Box Office $205,000

Frankenhooker is a visionary work of cinema. It's a vision so bizarre and singular that you can barely wrap your mind around the existence of such a vision. I want to be in a room where someone thought of the idea for Frankenhooker and then wrote a screenplay. They then took the idea to other people and instead of laughing this bizarre idea out of existence, they handed over funding to make Frankenhooker. Actors were then sought and cast in Frankenhooker. Movie theaters were then invited to book Frankenhooker to be screened for paying audiences.

How? How did this get past the idea phase? How did anyone conceive of this series of scenes which begins with a woman being destroyed by an out control lawn mower and then having her head preserved and attached to a patchwork of body parts cultivated from dead sex workers. There are many weird movies in the world that leave you scratching your head over how someone came up with such nonsense but few of those movies have the head of a dead woman being grafted onto a body made up of a patchwork of dead sex workers.

If you don't know about Frankenhooker you, perhaps, think I have suffered some kind of mental collapse and that I am just making something up out of the fractured pieces left in my shattered psyche, but no, Frankenhooker is an actual movie that was made and distributed. Frankenhooker was released in 1990 and today, it is readily available to anyone capable of streaming movies right now. Rather than being the dramatic result of this writer having suffered a traumatic brain injury, Frankenhooker is a real movie. I swear it is.

Frankenhooker stars James Lorinz as Jeffrey Franken, a small-time mad scientist who lives with his mother. James is in love with Shelly and the two are set to be married soon. That all changes when Shelly is gruesomely murdered by an out of control, remote control lawnmower that Jeffrey had made as a gift for Shelly's father. Though most of Shelly was eviscerated, Jeffrey manages to save her head and uses a solution he'd created for a different mad scientist project, one involving a brain in a jar on his mom's kitchen table, to preserve Shelly's pretty head and brain.

But why? Why preserve Shelly's head? Well, Jeffrey believes that he can save Shelly from death. Yes, Jeffrey has a cure for decapitation but it's not a cure that is easy to deploy. No, unfortunately, it will require a lot of bloody murder. The cure will mean the gruesome death of several sex workers. Thus, in order to save Shelly, Jeffrey takes the last of his life savings and goes to big city where a pimp named Zorro helps him hire several sex workers whom Jeffrey plans to murder and assemble into the perfect body for Shelly. He has two days to make this plan work with a thunderstorm expected to power Jeffrey's Shelly monster. Shelly-Monster, get it? Mary Shelley-Frankenstein? Frankenhooker is where subtly goes to die.

The ending of Frankenhooker turns the Frankenstein story into a Tales from the Crypt/Twilight Zone style movie with a twist that turns the tables on Jeffrey in a visual you need to see to believe. Then again, to believe that anything in Frankenhooker actually exists, you need to see it for yourself. It's one of the wildest ideas that anyone has ever brought to the big screen. The fact that something this insane exists is a testament to pure insanity as art.

In fact, that dovetails into my theory as to how Frankenhooker came to exist. A crazed mental patient named Frank Henenlotter showed up at the office of Troma Films founder Lloyd Kaufman, babbling incoherently. Kaufman, also being mostly insane, invited the escaped mental patient into his office where the two became fast friends. The various voices in each man's head conceived of Frankenhooker and Kaufman used thevast fortune he had garnered from softcore porn-drive-in theater movies tp make their shared delusion into a reality. That's as good a theory behind the creation of Frankenhooker as any you can think of.

I genuinely don't know how to feel about Frankenhooker. The title makes me cringe every time I write it. The movie is completely insane but, much like a trainwreck, I cannot look away. I can't help but marvel at the ludicrous audacity of Frankenhooker. I can't help but be left gobsmacked by every bizarre twist and turn of this 'narrative.' I put narrative in quotes here because, I guess, on a base level, this is a narrative, but the word connotes far too much dignity to be applied to something like Frankenhooker.

I am forced to say that I kind of admire Frankenhooker. I admire the fact that something this gonzo and over the top managed to be created and shown to the world. I marvel at the fact that this movie still exists today and is easily accessible via streaming. I marvel at the fact that this ever existed. It's just so insane. It's so feverishly bizarre, so brazen in its very existence that I can't help but appreciate it, if only a little.

Frankenhooker cannot be mistaken for being good or even deserving to exist, but it does exist, and I cannot forget this movie. Frankenhooker is a movie that will forever be ingrained in my memory for its sheer audacity. It will remain a cult novelty for the rest of time. It's an idea that is so insane, so mind blowingly odd that it cries out to be witnessed and catalogued for the ages. And yet, it's also just a low budget exploitation movie. It still looks like a piece of trash. It's a cheap bit of nonsense that resonates only because you simply cannot believe that it exists at all.

In other articles I do want to talk about sex workers and the way they are often mistreated in horror films and other genres as well. That will be a part of my book, Horror in the 90s (Not the official title), from which this article on Frankenhooker is taken. Something about Frankenhooker makes it feel wrong to discuss important issues such as sexual exploitation, the victimization of sex workers, and horror's patriarchal approach to presenting female sexuality. Frankenhooker is far too undignified to be the jumping off point for that conversation.

Thus, you will have to wait for the book for that article. This piece on Frankenhooker is only a taste of the strange, macabre, and unlikely aspects of horror in the 90s that will be part of the book. But I cannot bring you that book without your support. If you'd like to help me make my book a reality, please consider making a monthly pledge here on Vocal or consider a one-time donation via Vocal's Tipping feature. If you do, you will get a mention in the book when it is completed.

For now, you can read previous promotional entries for the book on movies such as Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer, The First Power, Brain Dead, Tales from the Darkside The Movie, and The Exorcist 3 on Horror.Media or on my Vocal Profile. These pieces are a good indication of the fun I am having writing this book and the fun I am going to have once the book is ready to publish. But I cannot publish without your help so please consider a donation to support Horror in the 90s.