Frankenhooker (1990)

(On Cable TV, September 2020) This. This is what B-movies should be about: grotesque, raunchy, offensive, funny, audacious, goofy and not for everyone. Frankenhooker, as the title suggests, is a riff on Frankenstein (or maybe The Brain That Wouldn’t Die) as an amateur scientist goes the stitched body-parts route to revive his dead girlfriend. In the hands of writer-director Frank Henenlotter (famous for Basket Case), the result is a bizarre mixture of horror, comedy, nudity and dismembered body parts. It’s not made for mainstream audiences: Frankenhooker is deliberately aimed at the EC-comic sensibilities of horror fans who can take a gory joke and revel in the sickness of it. (By the time the protagonist’s “super-crack” makes prostitutes explode, well… even the bad special effects are part of the fun, as the actresses are switched with obvious mannequins that then explode.) While James Lorinz headlines the film as the nerdy scientist, I was more interested in seeing Heather Hunter in a small role. It’s all capped off by a dark ironic joke that claws back much of the film’s over-the-top misogyny. While I’m not sure that I would have been as charmed by Frankenhooker before becoming a jaded horror viewer, I found it all very funny—one of those wonderfully perverse, absolutely reprehensible films that are nonetheless about as far as it’s possible to go in that vein while remaining fun rather than gross. The 1980s were big on those films (there’s a heavy streak of Re-Animator energy here) and it’s a shame that we haven’t seen anything quite like this in the years since then. But, at least, we’ll always have Frankenhooker…