Watch Frankenhooker For Free

Masterful Movie

Just perfect...

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

This 1990 horror comedy stars James Lorinz and Patty Mullen. This tells about young man, Jeffrey (Lorinz) who is an aspiring scientist. After his fiancée, Elizabeth (Mullen) dies in an accident, he preserves her decapitated head and decides to recreate her body using fresh parts of dead prostitutes. This is a good send-up of "Frankenstein" & "Bride of Frankenstein" and Lorinz & Mullen are great in it. Check this out if you're into horror comedies.

In New Jersey, Jeffrey (James Lorinz) is a talented inventor in love with his bride-to-be Elizabeth (Patty Mullen). During a barbecue to celebrate the birthday of Elizabeth´s father, she activates a remote controlled lawnmower that Jeffrey built for his father-in-law. However she stays in front of the device and her body is cut into pieces. Jeffrey studies how to bring Elizabeth back to life and realizes that he will need body parts. He drives to New York to get the necessary parts from prostitutes but his experiment loses control and he blows-up several women with an exploding crack he had developed. Now he has the necessary parts to build his fiancée back, but when Elizabeth flees from his laboratory, Jeffrey has problems with the pimp Zorro (Joseph Gonzalez) that lost his girls. The cult "Frankenhooker" is one of the best black-comedies ever made. The plot is a grotesque joke with "Frankenstein", but the result is hilarious. James Lorinz and Patty Mullen steal the film with cynical and lovely performances. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "Frankenhooker - Que Pedaço De Mulher" ("Frankenhooker - What a Piece of Woman")

In the early '90s it was rare for a film to possess much in the way of originality, which is why Frank Henenlotter's campy spoof of the Frankenstein theme stands out from the crowd. Sure, the film is full of the awful rubbery special effects so popular in late '80s cinema, but for once it possesses some imagination, some ideas which make it a great deal more entertaining than half a dozen of your low budget no-hopers.The camp tone of the film is set out from the start when our hero's girlfriend is killed by a lawnmower, of all things (although this cut-away scene is no match for the infamous classic finale of BRAINDEAD). Yes, the film does depend almost solely on goofy jokes for entertainment purposes, but there's no harm in this. Okay, so perhaps a little more wit would have improved things all round, but you can't have everything.The acting consists of either mugging at the camera (especially in the case of the title character, who performs some ridiculous gurning), or being just plain bad. James Lorinz himself isn't too bad, and there is something endearing about his teenage scientist who sticks a drill in his brain to stimulate himself. In fact, Lorinz is part of the reason to watch this film. He's not a particularly gifted actor, but there's just something about him which makes him fit this role like a glove. For the most part, we are bombarded by bad computer effects, some cheap and tacky gore, lots of gratuitous nudity, pseudo-science and, in the film's most remembered scene, prostitutes literally exploding all over the place. Although this scene is patently unrealistic, at least you won't find it anywhere else.As for the horror content, there is little. An effective ending has the principle villain being eaten by a hideous 'something' in a slimy freezer, but that's about it as the rest of the film is played strictly for laughs. Henenlotter certainly makes the most of his low budget, and many of the special effects are ambitious, if not totally realistic. They all fit into the spirit of the thing, in any case. For fans of cheesy horror flicks, FRANKENHOOKER is definitely one of a kind.

This is the first effort I have checked out from cult figure Henenlotter (though I owned another 2) and, on the strength of which, I acquired a couple more; for the record, I opted to watch it now as part of a belated mini-Frankenstein marathon to complement my recent James Whale retrospective. The film's disarming marriage of black humor and gory effects is comparable to the style of Stuart Gordon (of whose work I am familiar with seven movies) – although, to be fair to him, Henenlotter came first. It is obviously an updated version of the 'man-made monster' myth (though the director says, in the accompanying Audio Commentary, that he was actually inspired by the minor cult THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN'T DIE [1962]), infused with a quirky touch and a good deal of naïve charm (particularly the two lead performances).The plot concerns a young man with a penchant for science whose girlfriend dies horribly mangled in a freak garden accident (during a birthday party no less). A very funny bit here has his mother – played by Louise Lasser, the ex-Mrs. Woody Allen – cluelessly offering help by asking if he wants a sandwich right as he has finished spouting off a diatribe of existentialist angst! Thereafter, he contrives to revive the girl...only he requires a fresh body; to this end, he scours the city streets by night (also landing in a bar presided over by burly Shirley Stoler of THE HONEYMOON KILLERS [1969] and SEVEN BEAUTIES [1975] fame) in search of a prostitute or, rather, prostitutes since he now intends giving his girl the perfect figure. Organizing a party in order to choose the specimens (which he nonchalantly ticks with a permanent marker as they parade by him half-undressed!), the girls overdose on his specially-prepared "Supercrack" narcotic – which causes them to explode and mess the place up (hilariously, when their macho pimp smells a rat and goes up to the hero's room, he is knocked out by the flying head of one of the hookers on opening the door)!Interestingly, this is the first Frankenstein movie I have come across where the probability of diverse complexions within the monster's body is addressed – so that parts of it are pale-white and others are dark-toned, or even black! However, one thing that baffled me was why, if he kept the original girl's head (and, one assumes, brain), did the creature then revert to exclusively adopting the prostitutes' lingo! That said, the scenes where she goes to look for clients herself, lumbering around in her over-sized boots and twitching her face (I assume, to show that she was still getting used to it but, again, this is the one the girl always had!) and then have them literally combust under her are quite amusing. The climax has the pimp beheading the hero for having destroyed his fount of income, after which he is himself killed by the remaining body parts of his own girls – which are suddenly freed from storage and rise again grotesquely misshapen as if something out of John Carpenter's THE THING (1982)! The coda, then, sees the heroine (somewhat predictably but none the worse for that) re-animate her boyfriend/creator by following his own meticulous experiment notes! P.S. Given that BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935) is my all-time favorite horror film and that I would soon follow this viewing with that of Alain Jessua's FRANKENSTEIN 90 (1984), it was quite amusing for me to hear the creation sequence here underscored by music highly redolent of Franz Waxman's celebrated one for the former and that Henenlotter had initially intended calling his own concoction – shot, we are told, back-to-back with BASKET CASE 2! – like the latter (of which, presumably, he was unaware)!