FRANKENHOOKER: The Sweet-Natured Side Of 42nd Street Sleaze

The Frankenstein mythos doesn’t exactly lends itself to a heart­felt, light­hearted treat­ment.  This arche­type is built around a doc­tor whose ambi­tion out­paces his moral­ity and a living-dead crea­ture dri­ven to insane vio­lence by the unholy nature of its con­di­tion.  If you were to take that arche­type and plant it in Times Square dur­ing the end of its Sodom and Gomorrah era, com­plete with crack cocaine and hard-luck hook­ers, it would seem to be a for­mula for grotesque sick humor.

Frankenhooker deliv­ers all of the above… yet it’s an oddly sweet-natured and affec­tion­ate cre­ation more like to inspire smiles than screams, at least from exploita­tion movie fans who can see the nat­ural humor in their obsessions.

In this take on the mythos, the hero is Jeffrey Franken (James Lorinz), a like­able schlemiel who works for the power com­pany and dab­bles in sci­ence on his off time.  He man­ages to keep one foot in nor­mal­ity through his plump but kind girl­friend, Elizabeth (Patty Mullen).  Unfortunately, that life­line is trag­i­cally cut off when she makes the mis­take of step­ping in front of a remote-control lawn­mower that Jeffrey made while demon­strat­ing it.

Jeffrey descends into depres­sion but he doesn’t give up on his lady love: he sal­vages her head and a few other parts, keep­ing them alive with a spe­cial solu­tion, and plots to reassem­ble her using new body parts then revive her via electro-chemical meth­ods.  Of course, he must first get the body parts, which leads him to inves­ti­gate the hooker pop­u­la­tion in Times Square.  He man­ages to revive his lady love… but play­ing God always has unin­tended con­se­quences and there will be more death, res­ur­rec­tions, per­ver­sions of sci­ence and plenty of gal­lows humor before the story is over.

If looked at strictly in terms of grind­house ele­ments, Frankenhooker eas­ily deliv­ers the goods: the taut 85-minute run­ning time deliv­ers New York sleaze, gra­tu­itous nudity, humor about all sorts of for­bid­den sub­jects and mul­ti­ple explod­ing hook­ers.  That said, the film never feels coarse or mean despite por­tray­ing this bill of fare.  How does it pulls off this bal­anc­ing act?  The answer lies in the work of co-writer/director Frank Henenlotter: he approaches his odd­ball mate­r­ial with a dis­tinc­tive mix of gonzo wit, enthu­si­asm and affec­tion that makes Frankenhooker an unex­pect­edly charm­ing expe­ri­ence for cult movie types.

Indeed, Henenlotter goes out of his way to make the view­ing expe­ri­ence fun.  He weaves plenty of gags into each scene, not to men­tion skill­ful hor­ror ref­er­ences (for­mer Fangoria edi­tor Bob Martin was his co-writer, which adds to the strong genre pedi­gree).  The direc­tor main­tains a snazzy pace that keeps the energy high and goes for a candy-colored look, with an empha­sis on pink and blue that reflects the neon sleaze of the urban set­tings in a play­ful way (even the visual effects emu­late this color scheme).

Henenlotter’s play­ful approach is bol­stered by col­lab­o­ra­tors who give the film unusu­ally impres­sive pro­duc­tion val­ues for a low-budget effect: the pho­tog­ra­phy by Robert Baldwin (with an assist from Henenlotter) gives the film a neon comic-book look and Joe Renzetti adds a play­ful musi­cal score that includes a great jazz closing-credits theme.  The same can be said for the spe­cial effects: Gabe Bartalos adds nicely ren­dered makeup effects, includ­ing a great “crea­ture” design for Elizabeth and delib­er­ately cheap-looking gore effects in a H.G. Lewis style so the film’s gross-out gags prompt laughs instead of squirms.  Al Magliochetti deserves equal praise for some qual­ity opti­cal and minia­ture effects in the big res­ur­rec­tion sequence.

However, the key part in con­vey­ing the film’s sense of wacked-out fun lies in the per­for­mances and that area pays off here thanks to smart cast­ing.  James Lorinz, known to many a horror/exploitation fan as the wise­crack­ing door­man from Street Trash, excels here as Jeffrey, bring­ing the expected dead­pan wit but also adding a layer of pathos that allows the viewer to root for him even when he’s blow­ing up hook­ers with killer crack. There are also fun cameos from Louise Lasser, who is sweet in a world-weary way as Jeffrey’s mom, and Shirley Stoler as a butch bar­maid.  Perhaps the best of these cameos comes from David Lipman, who steals every shot as an eager cus­tomer of Elizabeth’s mon­strous alter ego.

However, the sur­prise is an excel­lent comic per­for­mance from for­mer Penthouse Pet Patty Mullen as Elizabeth, who essen­tially plays a dual role here.  As the pre-accident Elizabeth, she’s appro­pri­ately charm­ing.  When she is rean­i­mated, she crosses over into the kind of mad­cap comic great­ness you usu­ally only get in vin­tage Mel Brooks films.  Her distaff ver­sion of the Frankenstein mon­ster, blend­ing Tex Avery car­toon facial tics with ran­dom inter­jec­tions of hooker speak, is a sub­lime sleaze-comedy cre­ation.  It’s a shame this was her last fea­ture because she would have made a great comedienne.

To sum up, Frankenhooker is the most enter­tain­ing of Frank Henenlotter’s fea­tures because he’s able to tem­per the usual dark edge of his exploitation-horror vision with the kind of child­like glee that you get from a film­maker who is get­ting to revisit his child­hood obses­sions in homage form.  Even cult movie fans who aren’t into the seedy side of hor­ror and exploita­tion film­mak­ing might be won over by the joy­ful verve of this tongue-in-cheek gem.