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 thing. 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 had 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 is 33 years old and 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, Shelly's head is preserved.
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 of 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.
The ending of the movie 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 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.
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