From the demented genius who brought you Basket Case and Brain Damage comes ‘a terrifying tale of sluts and bolts!’ Frank Henenlotter’s Frankenhooker (at the time of this writing his last feature film though rumors persist about a return to the director’s chair – here’s hoping they’re not just rumors!) hit screens in 1990 and ever since has maintained a substantial cult following thanks to the film’s crazed blend of sex, humor, gore, and exploding hookers. 

When the film begins, Elizabeth Shelley (Patty Mullen) is excited to give her father his birthday gift – a powerful lawnmower that her boyfriend and soon to be husband, Jeffrey Franken (James Lorinz), has built a remote control for. Elizabeth hits the wrong button on the remote while showing it off to dear old daddy, and before you know it, she’s chopped up like ‘a salad.’ After dealing with the local news and dealing with his own grief, however, Jeffrey starts to formulate a plan to bring his beloved fiancé back to him. If there’s one thing Jeffrey knows it’s electricity and this, coupled with the medical training he got before he dropped out, is the genesis of what will become Elizabeth’s rebirth. 

In order to get his brain fired up and his creative juices flowing, Jeffrey pokes himself in the brain with a power drill and once the inspirational synapses start firing he figures out that the best way to rebuild his lady-friend (her body was destroyed though he’s been keeping her head and a few other bits and pieces in storage) is to knock off some hookers. After all, they’re bound to be well built so that he can reconstruct her the way he wants, and no one will notice when they go missing. 

With his plan set in motion, Jeffrey makes the trek from New Jersey to the Times Square of 1990 (very different than the family friendly Times Square that exists in Manhattan now) and he starts the selection process. After making the acquaintance of a few lovely ladies of the evening and trying to talk them into helping him out, he’s introduced to their pimp, a hulk of a man named Zorro (Joseph Gonzalez). Zorro figures if he’s got the money, he can have the honey and so he allows for Jeffrey to have a few of his finest females meet him at a hotel room to spend some quality time together. Jeffrey has second thoughts about all of this but not before the girls find a giant bag of killer crack cocaine that they proceed to smoke, not realizing that this crack has some serious side effects, primarily that it makes the user explode. Jeffrey gathers up all the parts he can use and high tails it out of there after Zorro is knocked out by a flying limb, and he heads back to Jersey where he builds Elizabeth a new body which he’s soon attached to her severed head. The storm arrives just in time, he gets the voltage he needs to re-animate her, and soon enough she’s come back to life – but there’s a kink in Jeffrey’s plan, which he learns as soon as she opens her mouth and asks him ‘Wanna date?’ and then heads out on a killing spree. 

Twisted, grotesque and funny Frankenhooker is both clever and completely dumb at the same time. It pays a few knowing homages to the Frankenstein films that came before it (just check out the names of the two leads) but throws in the same kind of trashy humor and grotesque effects that made Henenlotter’s earlier movies so much fun. It works well, particularly once Elizabeth has been re-animated and starts storming the streets of New York. There’s some great footage here and the seedy atmosphere of the locations really add something to the film. Much like Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator it uses the gross out scenes to get laughs as often as it uses them to shock and the whole thing feels very tongue in cheek. 

As far as the performances go, no one here is going to win any awards for their efforts but the acting definitely works fine for what the script calls for. The real reason to watch this one, however, is for the effects. While by today’s standards they may look primitive, the organic nature of the exploding hookers, the jigsaw puzzle Frankenhooker and the hodge-podge monsters that show up towards the end have got way more soul than any computer generated effort could ever hope to have. The previous DVD release from Simitar was missing a few minutes of footage – this newly remastered effort from Unearthed Films presents the movie in its complete form and at its full length running time.