Frankenhooker: Grime Over Goodness

Bad movies are better than good movies. What a sleaze-filled exploitation flick lays bare in its creator’s inability to obfuscate their perspective sheds far more light on human existence than any well-lit, polished and poised screen gem. When I watch Frankenhooker, the 1990 comedy horror directed by Frank Henenlotter, I see a complete picture of the way patriarchy rots the brains of every person it touches that, had any person interested in making “good” art been involved, might have suffered the softening effect of a coherent story. Like, Ex Machina wishes it could convey how fucked up our relationship to women’s bodies is the way power plant worker/bioelectric mad scientist Jeffery putting his girlfriend Elizabeth’s head on top of disembodied sex-worker’s torso does.  

Part of Frankenhooker’s ability to tap into that unvarnished misogyny is its basis in body horror—a frequent bad movie hallmark. As evidenced by its appearance in the Mary Shelley Fan Wiki, this “tale of sluts and bolts” takes inspiration from the 1818 novel Frankenstein. The story of a man robbing graves to achieve godhood, body horror is a side effect of Frankenstein’s primary message about the overreach of humankind at the detriment of its most vulnerable aka best friends and fiancées. While the original novel uses corpses as mere morbid setting for its protagonist’s cruel deeds, Frankenhooker is primarily preoccupied by bodies—specifically, women’s bodies. Their flesh is a toolbox for the men in the film: from the sex workers blown to pieces by super crack, to Elizabeth serving as the conclusive experiment for Jeffery’s lifelong work. 

Oh, yeah: Readers unaware of what super crack is should know that this is a form of crack cocaine created by Frankenhooker’s Jeffery in his lab specifically to kill sex workers. This cocaine is so powerful and addictive that anyone who takes it explodes, including the rat he first tests the substance on.

Within a more traditional cinematic piece, one could imagine thoughtful visual language being used to show how little difference there is between the abuse and manipulation Times Square pimp Zorro exercises on his sex workers and the necrophagic objectification Jeffery treats Elizabeth’s scattered body parts with. Of course, in doing so, the entire point of Frankenhooker would crumble. Instead, because nuance is the tool of cowards, this parallel comes through the fact that when attached to the torso of a deceased sex worker and electrocuted by a lighting storm, Elizabeth becomes fused into the same patterns as the women Jeffery built her from. She breaks from her slab and stomps her boots off to the city looking for johns. In the naked misogyny of this narrative, these women are given no complexity. All they are to the film, the characters, to the viewers, are tools. 

Lest my examinations lead any reader to think I’m not a fan, I’ll point out that I find Frankenhooker’s bluntness is refreshing. How many modern movies directed by straight, cisgender men navel gaze on their own contributions to the oppression of women under patriarchal norms? Consider films like Men, whose artful production obfuscates its thematic reality in metaphor and attractive visuals rather than confronting the truth of male violence head on. For the record, I found Men to be pretty alright and for much the same reason I like Frankenhooker: the body horror. But Frankenhooker’s body horror makes no metaphoric mazes of what it means in the way the multi-birthing Rory Kinnears of Men’s finale do. Instead, the slice and dice of Elizabeth, the sex workers, Zorro, and eventually Jeffery himself are blunt in showing how all bodies are subject to the machinations of patriarchy. Even if Jeffery holds the scalpel at the story’s beginning, by the end he is another head sewed on a dead sex worker’s body. There is no escape.

To be naked in their meaning makes a “bad” movie more valuable as an artistic object than any “good” cinema. Frankenhooker, though its silly gore may not impress as much as slick autuerist slaughter, has incredible value in how much its uncalculated approach reveals about the horrors of having a body in our society. Director Henenlotter said in his DVD commentary that “I never wanted this to be a gore film,” and in my estimation, that’s a silly want to ignore. What’s revealed in the slop and sensation of a gore film like Frankenhooker is the gross, terrifying, and absurd heart of humanity.