Frankenhooker: Henenlotter's Reanimated-Girlfriend Comedy

The video shop of my childhood sorted horror by how much the cover could get away with, and Frank Henenlotter’s third feature had one of the great covers: a woman assembled wrong, lit like a perfume advert, under a quote from Bill Murray recommending it as the one film you should see that year. Murray really did supply that line, and it did the job it was hired to do. I rented it years later than I should have, on a tape that had been rented a great many times before me, and discovered that the cover was honest. Everything the box promises is in there. What the box cannot tell you is that the film is also a piece of genre scholarship, delivered by a man who had watched the same 1962 drive-in picture I had and decided the only appropriate response was to remake it as a comedy.

The premise, handled carefully

Jeffrey Franken (James Lorinz) is an unlicensed medical enthusiast who works out of his mother’s garage in New Jersey and does not have a degree, because he keeps dropping out. He has a fiancée, Elizabeth (Patty Mullen), and a remote-controlled lawnmower he has built as a gift for her father. At a family barbecue the two facts collide. Jeffrey keeps what he can of Elizabeth in his mother’s freezer and forms a plan: rebuild her from better parts, sourced from Times Square, using a compound of his own design to make the acquisition easier.

That is roughly the first twenty minutes, and it is all in the trailer, so I have given away nothing. Louise Lasser plays Jeffrey’s mother with a wonderful weary patience, as though she has already had this conversation about the freezer and has decided to lose it slowly. The film’s engine is Jeffrey’s absolute sincerity. He is a monster with a project plan.

Henenlotter’s method

By 1990 Henenlotter had made Basket Case, a 16mm fable about a boy and the deformed twin he carries around Times Square in a wicker hamper, and Brain Damage, in which a parasite trades euphoria for murder and does the talking. Both films are set in a New York that was still, at the point of filming, the New York that produced them: the pre-clean-up 42nd Street of grind houses and single-room-occupancy hotels. Henenlotter shot on those pavements because they were the cheapest thing available and because he liked them.

Frankenhooker is his glossiest picture, which in context means it looks like a proper low-budget film rather than a semi-professional one. He is also, by this point, a director with a thesis. All three films are about a man who has attached himself to something monstrous and calls the attachment love: the twin in the basket, the parasite on the neck, the fiancée in the freezer. Henenlotter keeps making the same picture, and Frankenhooker is the draft where he finally admits the monster is the man carrying it. The effects are by Gabe Bartalos, who had worked the same rubber and latex on Henenlotter’s previous two. The distinctive thing about Bartalos’s work here is that it stays funny while remaining genuinely nasty. There is a difference between gore that reads as cartoon and gore that reads as meat, and Frankenhooker keeps a foot in each. Elizabeth’s reconstructed body is a patchwork with visible seams and mismatched skin tones, and the film never cuts away from it apologetically. It is treated as a result. Jeffrey is pleased with his work.

Why it works: the lawnmower

The lawnmower sequence is the film in miniature, and it is worth pulling apart because it explains why Henenlotter is a better director than his reputation suggests.

The gag is constructed with genuine patience. We are given the mower early, as an object of pride. We are given the barbecue, the family, the small talk. The comedy is domestic and slightly boring on purpose. Then the mower gets loose, and Henenlotter makes a choice that a lesser splatter director would have missed: he holds on Jeffrey’s face. The camera is on the man who built the machine, watching the machine work. The horror is his, and it arrives before the gore does. Only afterwards do we get the aftermath, and the aftermath is staged as a joke about tidying up.

That ordering is the craft. Set-up, dread on a human face, then the payoff, then a comic deflation. Henenlotter runs this pattern all the way through the picture, and it is why the film survives repeat viewing when so many of its shelf-neighbours curdle. A splatter gag that goes straight to the splatter is over in a second. A splatter gag with a face in the middle of it has a story in it.

The second thing he gets right is Lorinz’s performance, which is pitched somewhere between a stand-up and a sleepwalker. Jeffrey talks himself through his own atrocities in a flat, reasonable murmur, and the more reasonable he sounds the worse it gets. He is playing a Frankenstein who is fundamentally a hobbyist. There is a long sequence of him alone in the garage, narrating his intentions to nobody, and Lorinz plays it as a man rehearsing an excuse he already knows will not work.

Patty Mullen deserves more credit than she has ever collected for the back half. Mullen had been a Penthouse Pet before this and did very little acting afterwards, which has allowed people to file her performance as a lucky accident. It is not one. The reanimated Elizabeth is played almost entirely through physical distortion — a jerking, broken-doll rhythm, a face pulled into shapes that read as damage rather than as mugging — and Mullen commits to it without once asking the camera for sympathy. It is silent-comedy technique, and it is doing the film’s heaviest lifting, because the character has to be simultaneously a victim, a monster and a punchline. Most actors would pick one.

The real ancestor

Frankenhooker is filed under Frankenstein, and Mary Shelley is in the title, so people stop there. The actual parent is The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, shot in 1959 and released in 1962, in which a surgeon keeps his decapitated fiancée’s head alive on a tray and then goes shopping for a replacement body among strip clubs and photographers’ studios, while the head begs him to let her die.

Watch the two together and the descent is unmistakable. The severed fiancée who remains conscious and has opinions. The male scientist who insists his crime is love. The sleazy geography of the body-hunt, which in both films is where the picture actually lives. The 1962 film plays it straight and is, in stretches, dreary; the interesting part is the head, who is the only character with a coherent moral position. Henenlotter clearly noticed that, and the joke he built is simple. Take the same story and admit it is grotesque. Let the fiancée be furious about it. Let the body-shopping be the comedy rather than the padding.

If you want to see the machinery even more nakedly, the strand runs back further to Eyes Without a Face in 1960, where a surgeon harvests girls to repair his daughter’s ruined face and the film is beautiful about it. That is the same premise treated as poetry. Henenlotter treats it as a man in a garage with a plan and a freezer, and I would argue the garage version tells more truth about the impulse. The gothic surgeon has always been a man who wants a woman to hold still.

The case against

The film’s central problem is right there in the title, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Frankenhooker’s second act is built on the disposal of sex workers as raw material, and while the film is clearly on their side in a rough way — they get the best lines, they are the only competent people in the picture, and the joke is squarely on Jeffrey’s monstrous self-regard — the pleasure the camera takes in the set piece is not entirely ironic. Henenlotter is having it both ways. He has made a satire about a man who treats women as parts, and he has also made the thing the satire is about, and he wants you to enjoy both.

Some people find that a fatal contradiction, and I understand the argument. My own view is that the film knows exactly what it is doing, because of where it ends up, and the ending is a rebuke to Jeffrey that the film has been building since the first frame. But the honest reading admits that ninety minutes of a picture is not redeemed by its last five, and if the middle stretch loses you, it will lose you completely.

The other complaint is structural. The film runs out of story before it runs out of running time, and there is a stretch in the third act where Henenlotter is visibly waiting for the finale. This is a common shape in low-budget horror, and Frankenhooker has a milder case than most.

The verdict

It is the best of Henenlotter’s first three, and the one I would hand to someone who thinks 1980s American splatter was only ever mean. Frankenhooker is a rude, sincere, technically sharp comedy made by a man with real affection for the trash it descends from, and it does the hardest thing in horror comedy: it stays scary while it is being funny. The rubber has aged beautifully, which is the usual reward for building it rather than rendering it. It is widely available restored, and the restoration is a genuine improvement — the film was always colourful, and now you can see it.

Pair it with The Brain That Wouldn’t Die for the lineage, or with Street Trash for the same New York on the same budget in a fouler mood.

Spoilers below

The reversal is the reason the film holds up. Elizabeth comes back wrong — she comes back with the accumulated instincts of the women she was assembled from, and she goes back to work on 42nd Street, killing her clients with the same casual efficiency Jeffrey used on her donors. She is his bill.

Then the film delivers its actual closing argument. Jeffrey ends up on the table, rebuilt by Elizabeth from the parts she has to hand, with a woman’s body and his own bewildered head, staring up at her while she works. The last image is the man who spent the film assembling an ideal woman, becoming an object assembled by one, and being no happier about it than his victims were.

It is a punchline with a thesis inside it, and it lands because Henenlotter has spent the whole picture refusing to let Jeffrey notice that he is the villain. He never does notice. He just changes places.