Frankenhooker (1990)

I know Frank Henenlotter’s a hero of low-budget and shock cinema, but I outright hated Frankenhooker for most of its runtime. Some of this probably has less to do with the film than with the fact that the movie has occupied an outsized presence in my brain for decades as the VHS box that went “Wanna date?” when I touched it at Video Exclusive, the box alone being something of a totemic object for me. I’ve owned and fobbed off copies of Frankenhooker so many times that it felt like I’d seen it, too, so when it opened with kitchen table science and a backyard barbecue I thought we’d maybe picked the wrong film on Tubi.

But nah, we had it right, and for way, way too long between the robotic lawnmower bit and the payoff I felt like Frankenhooker was kind of wasting my time. Its mad scientist protagonist Jeffrey Franken spends way too much time talking to himself in his mother’s basement, like Jeffrey Combs’ Dr. Herbert West with all of the vitality and weirdo charm removed via trepanation, and while Henenlotter expressed surprise that his conservative Christian parents didn’t object to the film, its lack of sophistication in its deadpan delivery of Regan-era anti-drug slogans and the gruesome(ish) deaths visited upon Franken’s sex worker victims was probably pretty agreeable with their beliefs.

There were bits and pieces suggesting something greater at work — the cartoon color palette, the low-fi lavishness of the prop heads and limbs and living brains, Zorro the pimp — but nothing, not even Patty Mullen’s incredible physical comedy when Frankenhooker finally gets to the fucking promise of its title, that could have prepared me for its conclusion. It’s rare that a movie gets me hooting and hollering at the television, y’all, and while I a) can’t say that the destination was really worth the journey, and b) won’t be stumping for it next October when Triangle Queer Film is trying to figure out what to play for Halloween, I’m pretty sure that had I actually watched Frankenhooker during any of the many points in my life prior to tonight that I could have done so, that it would have lodged itself into the same part of my brain that’s occupied by Jame Gumb, Angela, the trans prostitute Chyna tricked Mark Henry into dating, and the many, many women who danced across the screen on episodes of Jerry Springer during my youth; problematic queens, all, but somehow necessary to the person I was destined to become.