"Wanna date?"

When my high school friends and I were customers of Videosmith in Lexington, MA in 1990, one of our favorite activities was finding the movie with the novelty video box and listening to its garish pre-recorded scream. While looking for the movie we were going to legitimately watch that night -- probably some dumb action movie -- one of us would invariably hunt down this movie, bringing it over to where everyone else was gathered around the options, and press the button on the front of the box, always at least a dozen times, to listen to it scream:

"WANNA DATE?"

This movie was Frank Henenlotter's Frankenhooker, and the person screaming the phrase was a stitched up prostitute who looks as you see above. (We didn't call them "sex workers" in 1990.)

Listening to her catchphrase -- which was pitched in such a tone that it almost sound like a crazed vaudevillian mimicking a reanimated prostitute -- never ceased to reduce us to gales of laughter. However, we never dared, or probably even considered, renting it. There was a zero percent chance that it could be anything but awful, and we weren't horror fans anyway. (If we'd known the good glimpses of nudity it would have offered us, we might have changed our tune.)

I couldn't possibly have been more wrong about Frankenhooker, which I finally watched Thursday night on Kanopy, 34 years later, on what I believe was my first exposure to it in any context since then.

Oh, we obviously got the basic gist of it right. This Troma-produced horror comedy is low budget and pretty seedy. It is also comedically brilliant and actually pretty well acted. And none of the humor is unintentional. 

You can tell they're in on the joke from the very start. The main character Jeffrey, played by James Lorinz, is a brilliant medical mind who nonetheless has failed out of three different medical schools. He's engaged to a pretty girl, Elizabeth, played by Patty Mullen. Until one day at a backyard BBQ, she's torn to shreds by the remote control lawnmower Jeffrey invented.

The idea that the blades of a lawnmower could not just do a number on a person's legs, but in fact chuck them up into so much biological confetti across the back yard, is the first indication that Frankenhooker totally gets what it's doing. Jeffrey secretly makes off with various body parts in order to try to reconstruct Elizabeth, since he's already been testing some of his theories on the revival of dead flesh with a brain in a tank of goo in his lab, which comically has an eyeball sunk into its cerebral cortex.

The lightning storm any mad scientist needs is only two days away, so where is Jeffrey going to get the remaining parts he needs to make a full Elizabeth in that short amount of time? Why, from Times Square of course, where he's got enough cash to pick up enough sex workers (I'll call them that in 2024) to have his choice of the best body parts from each. He arranges with their pimp Zorro (Joseph Gonzalez) to have about seven of them meet him in the cheap motel where they turn their tricks, but he's not a murderer at heart. So he develops a perfectly gonzo plan to create this special sort of crack they will smoke that will cause them to internally combust, in such a way that the various arms and legs and buttocks and breasts will remain intact enough for reuse.

If you aren't laughing yet, what's wrong with you? The explosive crack is funny enough on its own. (And it's not the last time characters explode in this movie.) But Frankenhooker is hilarious throughout in little details. I'll just recount one example that comes to mind.

As Jeffrey is still having feelings for Elizabeth while he keeps her remaining parts healthy and ready for reuse in a meat refrigerator filled with sloshing blue water, he writes a poem for her one day. The poem itself is also hilarious, but the part that really got me comes next. With a straight face, he says he wants her to have it, and then removes an intact hand from the blue water, sliding the paper copy of the poem in between two fingers held erect by rigor mortis. 

Laughing yet?

I won't try to oversell Frankenhooker to you. But it is available on Kanopy, so if you have Kanopy, it would be free. And I think this is the only place it might be available, since I recall looking for it through normal channels such as iTunes at least once in the past, obviously without success. 

Also it occurs to me that this would have been the perfect movie to watch last October, when my Halloween theme was horror comedies. The comedy is a far more significant aspect of this movie than the horror, but whenever you've got bodies blowing up, there's obviously horror involved too. And there's a great climactic scene I won't spoil that makes terrific use of practical horror effects.

Before I go, I did want to tell you why I thought the acting was good. 

First there's Patty Mullen as Elizabeth, who plays Jeffrey's girlfriend with great girl next door innocence possibly mixed with a bit of vacuousness. But her real time to shine is as the title character, when she walks around all herky jerky, screaming out "WANNA DATE?" and other sales tactics of your average street walker, and screwing up her face into all sorts of great expressions. The movie couldn't have asked for a better Frankenhooker.

Then there's Lorinz as Jeffrey, who adopts just the right tone for his character, and has this one great speech near the start to his mother (played by Louise Lasser, the only actor in the film I recognized) where he talks about his mental state, saying things like "I feel like I'm starring into a deep black void of madness." He delivers this in an even-keeled manner, not the larger-than-life mode you might expect. When he gets to the end of about maybe a minute-long monologue, a total cry for help, his mother can only think to say:

"Can I make you a sandwich?"

Mic drop.

As it turns out, I do want a date with this movie -- and am looking forward to the second date in this budding relationship.