In April, Katy Perry went from just being an entertainer to being a punchline following her “flight” in that Blue Origin space penis. Rather than just move away from the spotlight and let things die off, she ended up going on tour looking like Frankenhooker meets the drunk girl at a bar/party that everyone wants to avoid.
Perry did the worse “White Woman” dance that she thinks is great since Julie Stiles in Save the Last Dance including a light jump that looks worse than Elon Musk at that Trump rally. But this isn’t a post about Katy Perry. It’s about Frankenhooker, that crazy 1990 movie that you might have seen on Cinemax or the video store back in the day and wondered – Is this real?
It is. It’s both bad and good at the same time. Where else are you going to see an actress like Louise Lasser perform in the same movie as porno actors? Ok, Lasser’s role basically boils down to maybe a couple of scenes, but a lot of actors have done it when they owed someone a favor or needed the money. Frankenhooker comes from the mind of Frank Henelotter, who made such crazy exploitation horror movies like Brain Damage and Basket Case. You don’t go into a movie like this expecting a Hitchcockian style of terror and thrills.
To call Frankenhooker a horror movie is a misnomer. It’s only a horror movie because it involves a mad scientist assembling and re-animating body parts to bring his girlfriend back to life. The rest is a bunch of camp racy sex material and outrageous characters that you would normally find in a Troma Entertainment movie. It wasn’t. It was released by Shapiro-Glickenhaus Entertainment which was later acquired by Troma in 2021, though.
Actually, the movie became more controversial for what happened while it was trying to be released. Filmmakers, producers and even movie studio executive were at odds in the 1980s with the Motion Picture Association of America for slapping an X rating on movies that the ratings board felt had too much foul language, graphic violence or nudity and sexual content. However, the X rating had become synonymous with the porn industry.
Movies like Midnight Cowboy, Carnal Knowledge and A Clockwork Orange had received the X rating but they were later re-assessed. Midnight Cowboy, with its scene of a homosexual act probably garnered the movie its X rating, is the first and only movie to have been nominated for Best Picture Oscar and won. When Frankenhooker was released in the spring of 1990, it was facing the X rating.
Rumor has it that a members of the ratings board said they should rate it S for “Shit.” Movies that got slapped with X ratings were locked out of advertisements on TV and major publications as well as finding theaters, even though at the time there more independent movie theaters and video rental shops. Still, local laws on “community decency” could get them in trouble.
So, the movie ended up with the temporary A rating for “Adult” before the MPAA pretty much did a subtle “Fuck you!” to Hollywood by creating NC-17 and giving it to the erotic drama Henry & June. The movie had a cast that included Fred Ward, Uma Thurman, Maria de Medeiros, Richard E. Grant and even Kevin Spacey and it was directed by Phillip Kaufman. However, the rating has been a new black-eye for the last 35 years.
Anyway, Frankenhooker is crap but it’s amusing crap. It’s not spectacular amusing crap. But it’s worth a watch. And give props to a movie that was used as a punchline by comic Denis Leary. Or maybe it was Bill Hicks, I’m thinking of.
The premise involves Jeffrey Franken (James Lorinz) who lives in New Jersey but he’s dropped out of medical school. He’s grieving the loss of his girlfriend, Elizabeth Shelley (Patty Mullen), who died in an accident. She was chopped apart by an automatic lawnmower. Yeah, it makes no sense.
Jeffrey has collected her body parts, including her head, as he wonders how he can bring her back as he studies circuits and devises a drug substance that makes women explode. But since they’re all prostitutes when he thinks he’s re-animated Elizabeth, she ends up behaving like a prostitute asking Jeffrey “Want a date?” and “Got any money?”
She becomes hostile to those who both rebuff her and also have sex with her, resulting in one john basically being most disintegrated except for his head. At the same time, Zorro (Joseph Gonzalez), the pimp/crack dealer of the prostitutes, is tracking down Jeffrey.
It’s silly and outrageous but it’s a reminder of a bygone era in filmmaking when schlock movies like these were still recognized by famous critics of The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Variety, among others. Now, that most movie theaters are owned by corporations and media conglomerates, movies like this have gone straight to online streaming on Tubi.
Let’s not forget this movie came out as the same time as Ghost Dad, which was directed by Sidney Poitier with Bill Cosby distributed by a major studio. And it still got better reviews.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 