Jeffrey Franken (James Lorinz) is a college and medical school dropout working for Jersey Electric. In his spare time, he experiments with electricity and doing medical experiments. He calls himself a bio-electro technician. Currently he is working on communicating with a disembodied brain. He uses his garage as a makeshift laboratory. Jeffrey is engaged to Elizabeth Shelley (Patty Mullen). Jeffrey made a remote-controlled lawn mower for Elizabeth’s father’s (J.J. Clark) birthday. At his party Elizabeth unwraps the mower and shows her father how the machine works. Unfortunately, she is standing in front of the mower when she engages the machine into forward motion. The mower runs over Elizabeth and cuts her to pieces. The police investigate and find that some of Elizabeth’s body parts are missing; one of the missing parts is her head.
Devastated at the loss of his fiancé Jeffrey spirals down into depression and desperation. Determined to fix things he decides that he will build a new body for his beloved Elizabeth out of parts from other women. Jeffrey decides to visit the seedy parts of town and find a prostitute whose body he can graft to Elizabeth’s head.
Jeffrey meets Dolores (C.K. Steefel), one of the local “ladies of the evening”. He tells her that he is having a party and needs a bunch of women for entertainment. With a bunch of women to choose from he thinks he can find the perfect body. Dolores brings Jeffrey to see her pimp, Zorro (Joseph Gonzalez). They agree on a price. Jeffrey sees that Zorro keeps his girls in line by giving them drugs. He decides that he should create his own super drug for similar purposes.
When the girls show up Jeffrey examines them but can’t decide which body he wants. The girls get upset and are about to leave when they find Jeffrey’s stash of drugs. The girls go wild and start using the drugs. Unfortunately, the super drug has a nasty side effect of causing the user to explode. Jeffrey ends up with pieces of several prostitutes all over his hotel room. He hurriedly packs up the girl pieces and takes them back to his garage laboratory. Now he is ready to put the new Elizabeth together.
Things don’t go quite as planned.
“Frankenhooker” was released in 1990 and was directed by Frank Henenlotter. It is a dark comedy horror and science fiction exploitation film.
It’s mostly silly camp with lots of boobs and explosions. Most of the acting is sketchy except for Patty Mullen who does a great job as a “put together person”. James Lorinz as the whiny Jeffrey Franken is slightly insufferable and parts of the movie drag just a bit but overall, the movie ended up being fun. The special effects were actually better than they should have been. If you can get past all the boobs in your face it ends up having an unusual charm to it. There are grindhouse and exploitative aspects to the movie that add extra punch to the black comedy aspects.
The VHS version of the movie had what is referred to as a talk box. It was a button on the cover box that you could push. When you did you got to hear Frankenhooker ask “Wanna Date?”