Review of Frankenhooker (1990) by Jj D — 10 May 2008

So here's the deal. Frankenhooker is billed as a quote-unquote "horror comedy", although there really isn't any horror, and the comedy is sparse.

We begin with Jeffrey Frank (Lorinz) and his beautiful fiancee Elizabeth. Elizabeth gets chopped up by a renegade lawmower, and our man Jeff decides to do the only reasonable thing: round up some prostitutes and use their body parts to reconstruct his now deceased girl.

The movie moves kind of slowly, but mostly it's not bad at what it's trying to do. The question, though, is whether what it's trying to do is worth doing? Knowing that there was going to be a good amount of nudity in the film (just a bunch of topless women), the filmmakers decided to undercut the violent aspects -- opting to make the severed body parts look and sound, well, like they were made out of styrofoam. So what should have been a satire became nothing but a farce, which the occasional wit can't save on its own.

It's funny to hear Zorro, the pimp, grab our re-animated hooker by the arm and yell, "This isn't your arm! Where'd you get this arm?" But if it weren't so obvious that this was written strictly for laughs, that would have made it funnier.

Frankenhooker is not exactly bad, but it's lacking the earnestness which pushes that which is merely bad into the realm of greatness. It reminds me of Santa's Slay, another movie which delivers exactly what it promises and yet still feels like a let-down.

I don't want to say that 'more blood' is the answer, but it certainly would have been a step in the right direction.