I mentioned Frankenhooker a few years ago in a yearly round-up of the best and worst entertainment I experienced at the time but never wrote a review for it. Having watched it again recently, I felt the urge to cement my opinions on this site. It’s a small little horror movie that the average person has never heard of, but often invokes the same response when I mention its name. There’s a mixture of shock and laughter, occasionally followed by a “What the ___?” You may have had that very reaction when you clicked on the article. It’s a funny name, but it’s also pretty accurate in terms of what to expect.

What is it?

Jeffrey (James Lorinz) is an eccentric young inventor from New Jersey who has a loving and supportive girlfriend named Elizabeth (Patty Mullen). Jeffrey attends the birthday party of Elizabeth’s father and brings a gift that he made. It’s a high-powered lawnmower with a remote control and no safety features—truly a gift that every manly man would love. Elizabeth is beautiful, but she’s also not extremely bright. While describing how to operate it to her dad, she accidentally turns on the lawnmower behind her and makes it run her over, chopping her to bits (off-screen) in the opening scene.

Jeffrey cannot accept her death and is determined to find a way to bring her back to life, but there simply isn’t enough left of Elizabeth to stitch together. So, after a bit of brainstorming and putting a drill bit to his grey matter, he comes up with a plan. He opts to find another woman’s body and to stick Elizabeth’s head on it. He doesn’t really know how to go through with the process and ends up being too picky to choose just one woman. After a chaotic turn of events in which multiple hookers explode from some super-drugs he created—yes, this all happens—he is finally able to become the 1990’s version of Dr. Frankenstein he was meant to be.

What Makes it Special?

Frankenhooker was directed by Frank Henenlotter whose directorial library is primarily made up of the cult horror classics Brain Damage and the Basket Case trilogy. So if you’re familiar with those other films, you kind of know what to expect. He has a style to his work that makes his movies both a little unsettling and rather goofy at the same time. Simply put, Frankenhooker is my favorite of his and I consider it a near-perfect blend of horror, comedy, and cheesiness to make it a unique little experience. If you don’t believe that a movie with a title that translates to Frankenputa in the Spanish version could be so entertaining, allow me to explain.

The primary draw of Frankenhooker is its charm. I could try to break it all up into individual components, but when it comes down to it, Frankenhooker is a delightful cocktail of ingredients that work together to make a treat that’s not quite good, or bad, but unique and entertaining. Any of its components presented in isolation is not nearly as funny as them all combined into one tasty beverage. There’s a swirl of good and bad acting. There’s a hearty helping of good and comically bad makeup and special effects. And of course, it has a splash of ridiculousness in its plot with moments that are truly absurd. I have no qualms about giving away the scene involving the hookers and the super-drugs because it’s the very thing that made me want to see it for myself when I heard someone talk about it. It’s really all I knew about it before I watched it and found the film to be better than I could have hoped.

Up to the point at which the prostitutes start popping, Frankenhooker is a weird, low-budget film that really highlights how terribly dirty and dangerous Manhattan was in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. Jeffrey, in his efforts to find the right body for his girlfriend, interacts with some people who manage to evoke the grime of the era pretty well. He goes into backrooms with pimps dealing drugs and making sure their other “products” aren’t damaged. There’s a little tension in these moments, but other than the opening scene in which Elizabeth is killed off-screen, nothing horrific happens. Then Jeffrey develops his super-crack drug, tests it on a guinea pig, and it explodes in its cage (not real, of course), setting up the impending massacre. After Jeffrey hires a dozen girls from the pimp, Zorro—played by the stiffest actor in the film, Joseph Gonzalez—the women find his drugs and help themselves, despite his protests. When they start exploding, it’s with some of the cheapest special effects around. That’s not a mistake either. It was deliberately meant to look bad because it makes the scene that much funnier.

James Lorinz is great as Jeffrey. He has charisma and he’s able to channel the insane mad scientist persona with a New Jersey accent, while still being empathetic as his semi-murderous plan comes together. He has moments where he’s talking to himself as he schemes, which helps make him more eccentric but also helps Lorinz shine because he doesn’t really have anyone else to play off when he’s by himself. When he’s with the hookers of New York, he has something of a naïve snark that works well. He also drills holes into his own head for some reason that I’ve never quite understood, but he does it as a method of causing inspiration. While his plan of rebuilding his girlfriend using the bodies of women who supposedly have better bodies than she did is quite selfish, his mad plan and the fact that he has trepidations about murder make him a compelling character. I’m not saying he’s something that fell out of The Godfather, but that he’s the right character, played by the right person, for the right type of movie.

Similarly, his co-star Patty Mullen also does a good job with the role. While Lorinz has continued to act since Frankenhooker, Mullen’s acting career did not really continue. That being said, she is well suited to be the TITular monster—I make no apologies for that joke. It’s not because of her acting ability, but because when she finally does arrive in the film as the creature, she quickly takes control of your attention for a few reasons other than her outfit and looks. She mimics the Elsa Lancaster bride of the monster movements from Bride of Frankenstein. She also shouts phrases that the hookers said earlier in the film, insinuating their consciousnesses were transferred into her after the resurrection. Her stiff movements, goofy faces that she makes, and the lines she belts all make the movie funnier and it makes Mullen an entertaining monster.

What Are the Drawbacks?

It’s not a perfect horror comedy and it’s certainly not for everyone. There are plenty of things you can criticize. There are jokes that may not land when you see it for yourself, or consider them too dumb to be entertaining. If you are a horror nut, you might find the horror aspects of this film to be cheesy or weak. The overall charm of its low-budget, low-brow entertainment is what sells this movie. It’s not quite a “turn your brain off” type of film, but you have to be looking for something a little dumb and goofy if you want to get into it. It’s exploitation-lite.

If I were to compare it to other horror comedies I recently watched like Young Frankenstein or Club Dred, Frankenhooker does not even come close to the cleverness or production value of either. Even though Club Dred has its share of low-brow humor, I would say Frankenhooker stoops even lower. It’s an exploitation horror that manages to not go as low as a Troma film like The Toxic Avenger or Thankskilling (thank goodness), but it still doesn’t rise up to the standards that some horror fans might like.

TL;DR

I like to think about Frankenhooker as one of the better exploitation-lite films of the ‘90s. The exploitation horror films were much more of a thing in the ’70s, and even though there were features like Grindhouse in the early 2000s, it was a sub-genre of horror that just either faded into niche obscurity or morphed into the torture-porn sub-genre. Frankenhooker doesn’t do gore much because it’s more concerned with the comedy, and that’s why I think I enjoy it that much more. It’s more unique in its own way because low-budget horror films like this skirted the line between true exploitation grime and goofy fun. It’s dumb, absurd, and full of silly moments that make me laugh every time I see it.