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Between the release of The Bride and Guillermo Del Toro's Frankenstein winning 3 Oscars, popular culture seems to be reviewing all the incarnations of the 200-year-old Gothic novel. However, many seem to have glossed over the most unique retelling: Frank Henenlotter's Frankenhooker. A dark horror-comedy that the head of the MPAA board dubbed "the first movie to be rated S for shit".
While Henenlotter is generally considered a director of horror-comedy B-movies like Basket Case and Brain Damage, he considers himself a champion of exploitation films.
An exploitation film is a low-budget movie that attempts to "exploit" the more taboo human desires with graphic depictions of sex, violence, or drug abuse. While these movies are usually written off as being commercially driven, Henenlotter believes that they serve an important purpose as an art form.
"Usually, you don’t have the money to compete with Hollywood, so you compete by making it about something that Hollywood isn’t interested in embracing. Any time Hollywood has embraced a controversial subject, there’s been an exploitation film or a hundred who have been there first". -Frank Henenlotter
For him, the sensational and often gory nature of exploitation films is a larger-than-life way of exploring very real issues that the general public considers too controversial to discuss. No movie embodies this principle better than Frankenhooker.
The film follows young New Jersey native, Jeffery Franken, an electrician and medical school dropout with an aptitude for "bioelectricity". After a freak accident involving one of his inventions (a remote control lawnmower), his wife is chopped into several pieces. In his grief, he sets out to bring her back by building her a new body out of the body parts of dead Manhattan prostitutes.
Now, if a horror comedy about an electrician building himself a wife sounds like something you might enjoy, I recommend you stop reading and go watch it on Tubi, because I'm about to spoil it. For those of you who can say with confidence that you won't be watching it, give me a chance to explain why it might hold more merit than you'd think.
Frankenhooker is absolutely an exploitation film. There is rampant nudity, gore, and drug usage. The scene of a bunch of half-naked prostitutes exploding after smoking "super crack" is a particularly stand-out moment. It's terrible, raunchy, sometimes offensive, and it is exactly what you'd expect out of a movie titled Frankenhooker. However, if you can look past the exploding sex workers (a big ask, I know), you'll see that it's a brutally honest tale of the dangers of everyday misogyny.
Jeffrey Franken is a terrible man. From the very beginning of the movie, it is made clear that he is far more interested in his experiments than in his fiancée's interests. In one scene, Elizabeth explains how he stapled her stomach in an attempt to make her look less "heavy" despite having never graduated from medical school. His objectification of Elizabeth Shelley is made apparent and is outright criticized.
Even in the opening, as he's making up plans to bring her back from the dead, he's not depicted as a grief-stricken, lovelorn young man desperate to bring back the love of his life. He's shown to be a disturbed and obsessive madman who performs self-trepanations to regulate his emotions and who has dinners with his fiancée's severed head. A reprehensible man who's more focused on building Elizabeth a "better" body rather than bringing her back.
He's a man who quite literally sees women as an assembly of parts rather than as human beings.
When Elizabeth is first resurrected, she remembers nothing save for a few disjointed memories of the recently deceased sex workers. The Frankenhooker's first action as her own woman? Knocking Jeffery out after finding out he doesn't have money.
She then goes on a "rampage" as a walking embodiment of feminine rage. A standout moment is when she walks into a bar and begins shoveling pretzels in her mouth. The bartender remarks that she shouldn't eat too many pretzels or she might get fat. The Frankenhooker's response? She growls. Shortly thereafter, she electrocutes (to death) a creepy man at the bar before getting in a fight with Zorro, the pimp that Jeffery hired the sex workers through.
Eventually, Jeffery gets the "Frankenhooker" back to his lab and manages to recover Elizabeth's memories. Elizabeth is immediately horrified at her new body and accosts Jeffery for his atrocities. Jeffery, the misogynist that he is, doesn't understand why she's upset because his "methods may have been crude", but he did the best he could. Then, an enraged Zorro bursts in and decapitates Jeffery.
After a vengful assortment of "spare" body parts, kill Zorro, Elizabeth brings Jeffery back to life, but now he has a body made from the parts of women he killed. He has the body of a woman.
He treated women as an assembly of parts, and now, he is literally an assembly of those parts.
When asked about his thoughts on Frankenhooker as an exploitation film, director Frank Henenlotter said,
“A film has to be about something, I mean, "Frankenhooker", he didn’t just bring his girlfriend back to life, he wanted to fix her. She was heavy; he wanted to turn her into a centrefold. That’s the fucked-up aspect of that film; that’s why he must pay for his sin. I’ve always been fond when women embrace "Frankenhooker" because they see past the t-and-a and realise that that son of a bitch tried to fix her!”
Is Frankenhooker an Oscar winner? No. Does it have mass appeal? No. Is it an elegant metaphor? No.
But does it find a way to expose the seedy underbelly of everyday misogyny in a way that's not easily forgotten? Absolutely.
As mentioned, Frankenhooker is currently available to stream on Tubi. If you want to see a perfect example of an exploitation film, give it a watch.
