31 Days of Horror: "Frankenhooker"

by Sean McTiernan

There’s many ways one could interpret “Frankenhooker.” It could be seen as a meditation on breaking up. A warning about the obsessiveness and nostalgia that accompany the grieving process and how trying to fill that hole with sex and drugs is dangerous and harmful to everyone. You could see it as a simple tale about what one man will go through just to be happy again. Or you could just take it as a warning not to explode a load of prostitutes, sew them together and stick your dead wife’s decapitated head on top. Whichever you decide, they’re all good lessons to learn.

Jeffrey Franken is director Frank Henenlotter’s most endearing lead character. At the start of the movie he seems shy but happy with his life working in a powerplant. He tinkers with electronics and medicine, he got kicked out of three medical schools-they “upset” him-and he and his girlfriend Elizabeth, the standard dippy, endearing and doomed Henenlotter lady, are going to be married. Things quickly go south however when Elizabeth stands in precisely the worst place one can stand when demonstrating a remote-controlled lawnmower. One shredded lady and the local news is on the scene. Not for the bizarre death so much as the fact that not all of Elizabeth was found. It quickly becomes apparent Jeffrey knows exactly where those parts ended up and they play a large part in the plan he has for the lightening storm due to hit town in a couple of days. Now all he needs are some more parts. And, as he astutely observes out loud to no one in particular, he knows one street in town that’s exactly the kind of meatmarket her needs.

Jeffrey Franken is the exact opposite of fiction’s greatest mad scientist: Jeffrey Combs’ performance as Herbert West in the flawless Re-Animator Trilogy. While Herbert West is so intense he could probably reason living people to death and re-animate corpses just by staring at them, Jeffrey approaches everything he does with a mild nature and pleasant affability. Jeffrey always seems like he’s fixing a garden shed. Even his leering over prostitutes while deciding which part of them he’d like is completely non-threatening and jovial. His remorse over what he does seems real but he doesn’t go completely to pieces about it (oh yes) and there’s always his go-getting attitude to make the best of a bad situation (semi-intentional mass homicide being a pretty bad situation).

The scene that encapsulates everything there is to love about “Frankenhooker”: The Movie and Frank Hennenlotter: The Dude happens at around the thirty-five-minute mark. Up until then the movie has been relatively tame and actually quite sad. Sure, Jeffrey eats dinner with his fiance’s severed head (complete with a winsome visual pun on not being able to hold your drink), but that’s less about grossing you out and more about showing poor Jeffrey’s struggle with acceptance. And yes, he does use trepanning but again, compared to something like the cold turkey scene in “Brain Damage,” that seems positively quaint. Even the sudden dismemberment of Jeffrey’s one and only Elizabeth Shelly (yes yes, well spotted) at the start of the movie happens off screen. So up until the thirty-five minute-mark, things have been mutedly gorey and sweetly sad.

But when Jeffrey gets into the room with the ten prostitutes though, nonchalance is not a word you would associate with this movie.

Now in the scene beforehand, we see Jeffrey engineer some supercrack that he claims will painless kill the prostitutes, thus making it easy for him to harvest the parts he needs. This is actually the only scene in the movie where Jeffery goes a little Herbert West. Few things are creepier than seeing a man deciding that making poisoned supercrack doesn’t “really” make him a murder. Especially when he follows this by testing the supercrack on an unsuspecting gerbil, while speaking to it as if it were a prostitue. Never have I been more disquieted than having to watch a man tell a gerbil to “get into the car, honey.”

But once Jeffrey gets to the scene and goes through the measurements, he gets buyer’s remorse. Announcing that “you’ve all been so nice, I can’t go through with this,” he tries to leave. But the women of the night discover his supercrack and smoke it while restraining him. After this you assume, they will meet the “painless” end Jeffrey designed for them… which makes it a pretty fucking big surprise when they explode. And not gory-splattering-horror movie explode either. These women explode into flames.

It is disgusting, hilarious, ridiculous, probably unspeakably sexist and weirdly charming all at once. And it wraps up with another trademark visual pun when Zorro (that has to be in the Movie Pimp Name Hall Of Fame, right?) gets hit with his main lady’s head.

Jeffrey, staying true to his constantly endearing (oh and woman-butchering) character, gathers up all the parts, promises to put them back together again and then makes off to stitch together a body for Elizabeth. But when he does things don’t quite go according to plan. Instead of a perfect body for his perfectly resurrected wife, Jeffrey gets knocked out by a superstrong zombie prostitute with zero in common with his wife aside from her face. Said zombie prostitute then goes on the prowl, barking the variations of the last ten sentences of the women in the room spoke before they exploded and killing men by either pushing them into traffic or having sex with them till they go on fire. Mondays, am I right?

Ex-Playboy Playmate (not sure if the “ex” should be there, maybe it’s like being the President?) Patty Mullen does a fantastic job as the titular Frankenhooker, jerkily wandering around New York’s seedy backstreets barking at people about money. And when she comes back to her old self, she’s heartbreaking (and eventually bitterly sarcastic).

Now you probably think I’ve given away all the best bits. Wrongo, friend. The last ten minutes of “Frankenhooker” are pretty peerless. That’s right, in a movie where prostitutes explode and pimps named Zorro (I mean, what a great name, can we agree on that?) take zombie prostitutes in their stride, Frankenhooker manages to pull out more stops. Take it from Bill Murray’s blurb: “If you see one movie this year, see Frankenhooker.”

Sean Mc Tiernan has a blog and a twitter. So does everyone, though. He also has a podcast on which he has a nervous breakdown once an episode, minimum. You should totally email him with your questions / insults/ offers of tax-free monetary gifts.