It’s the oldest story in the book: boy meets girl, boy loses girl in freak lawnmower accident, boy rebuilds girl using the mismatched body parts of dead prostitutes…well, maybe Frankenhooker (1990) isn’t the oldest story in the book, but it is an entertaining one.
Jeffrey Franken (James Lorinz) is a lucky guy. His life might not be perfect―he’s been kicked out of three medical schools and still lives at home in New Jersey with his mother (Louise Lasser, far, far away from Mary Hartman)―but at least he’s found a loving fiancée, Elizabeth Shelley (Patty Mullen). Jeffrey works as an electrician, but he keeps a lab in his mom’s garage, where he likes to tinker (i.e., conduct unusual medical experiments, one of which appears to be a living human brain embedded with a large eyeball).
How Jeffrey ever got a girl in the first place is a mystery. He’s a mumbling, antisocial shut-in who seems to care for nothing but his weird research. But he does love the slightly zaftig Elizabeth, and she loves him. Life is good. But, as you know, the universe has a way of throwing curveballs.
Faster than you can say “complicating incident,” Elizabeth is killed by a remote-controlled lawnmower run amok. But these things happen; what’s unusual is that not all of Elizabeth’s body parts can be located.
Cut (ahem) to Jeffrey’s garage/laboratory, where we find him excitedly promising Elizabeth’s decapitated head that he will find a way to rebuild her―to make her better (and sexier) than she was before. He has the technology. All he needs is the right parts.
A visit to New York and a pimp named Zorro provides Jeffrey with all the raw material he could possibly need, as well as an idea for humanely killing his feminine fodder. As we all know, prostitutes love crack cocaine. So, he buys some crack from Zorro (Editor’s note: That’s a phrase I never thought I’d write), and a little tinkering later―voila, super-crack! A couple hits of this and the hookers will peacefully fade away. Unfortunately, Jeffrey’s pharmacology skills are not on a par with his medical and electrical skills. This new crack doesn’t just blow your mind, it blows you up…literally.
Soon, Jeffrey is awash in detonated hookers and has all the body parts he could possibly use. Before long, he has Elizabeth sewn back together and reanimated. But as we all know, once they’ve died and come back, they’re never the same.
I don’t want to spoil the end of the flick for you, but as you can probably guess, all does not turn out well for our star-crossed lovers. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a glimmer of hope to close out the film.
Frank Henenlotter, director of such classics as Basket Case and Brain Damage, has given us a movie that’s rather imbalanced tonally. Frankenhooker is clearly meant to be a farce, but for the most part it’s played pretty straight. Also, the two leads seem to be in different films. As Jeffrey, James Lorinz gives a rather earnest, method-y performance—kind of like Andrew McCarthy meets James Dean. But as Elizabeth/Frankenhooker, Patty Mullen is a hoot, all spastic expressions and Joisey accent, lumbering down the street trolling for a date. And a cameo by John Zacherle, one of the first horror movie hosts on television, feels like it belongs, well, on a television horror show.
So, Frankenhooker is something of a mixed bag, but that makes sense. I mean, it is made up of pieces that don’t quite fit. And who knows, maybe it’s supposed to feel that way. One thing’s for sure: They just don’t make ‘em like this anymore. Perhaps it’s because they can’t find the right parts.
~Theron Neel
“What’s in the basket?”
As children, Duane and Belial were quite happy as one, but their father insisted they be separated. And though the operation was a success—with Duane being the surviving entity, as they say in business—Belial was not disposed of effectively. So, of course, Duane retrieved Belial from the trash and stashed him in a basket. Belial then wreaked vengeance of a biblical sort on their father, and the boys were raised by their amazingly sympathetic aunt, who sensed their secret but told no one. 
As you might expect, Duane and Belial’s tale spirals downward from there. In print, the plot of Basket Case seems grim, but onscreen it manages to be fairly amusing in a dismal way. While watching the movie, I got the feeling there was a subversive layer of symbolism at play. As I wondered earlier: what’s really in the basket? Could it be Duane’s repressed homosexuality? You be the judge. 
