Horror Movie Review: Frankenhooker (1990)

Frankenhooker is as dumb as it sounds. Jeffery’s wife to be is killed in a freak lawnmower accident. Desperate to have her back he sets about trying to rebuild her using the different body parts of hookers.

Rather then just killing one & using her body he wants to make his wife even better. The perfect legs, the perfect arms, the perfect boobs…no simple task!

Jeffery (James Lorinz) heads off to the red light district & gets into a conversation with a hooker. He tells her he wants to throw a party & needs quite a few girls. She agrees to take him to her pimp, whose office is in the bathroom of a seedy looking club. As money is no object, Zorro the pimp agrees a price with Jeffery & the plan is is set in motion.

To make things easier, Jeffery buys a load of drugs off Zorro. The aim being to knock all the hookers out. At the party though the girls become tired of his odd doctor measurements (the montage of him checking their individual body parts to find the perfect matches for his dead wife is very silly) & discover his stash of drugs.

They all start taking the super-powered drugs & one by one explode into pieces! It’s hilariously stupid as you can obviously see the transition from woman to plastic model & the lack of gore is disappointing. Jeffery now has his body parts but Zorro the pimp busts in only to take a severed exploding head to the face.

Jeffery takes the body parts & heads back home. He rebuilds his wife & brings her to life in classic Frankenstein style. Unfortunately she is a mismatched mess taking on the personalities of the body parts. She instantly breaks free & goes on a shagging rampage all while spouting off many of the lines spoken by the hookers.

It’s these lines, her jerky body movements & obvious tattoo that draws the suspicion of a recovering Zorro. He realises that Jeffery had something to do with his disappearing girls so vows revenge.

This leads to a fun showdown in Jeffery’s lab where we see what happened to the remaining body parts that he didn’t use in practical effects glory (think Basket Case, it’s awesome).

Frankenhooker is a dumb, tongue in cheek movie that can be barely called a horror because of the lack of graphic content. Other then a splash of blood at the start with the lawnmower death it is pretty much gore free. The effects are pretty terrible & the acting both over the top & cheesy. Jeffery plays it very straight but a lot of his scenes are cringeworthy, such as the dinner scene with his wife’s severed head.

Patty Mullen as the reanimated hooker has fun in her role but her facial expressions are more comical then anything else. Her ability to kill via electricity is absurd but in a movie about a reanimated hooker-corpse it really doesn’t matter!

The thing is Frankenhooker is still a very entertaining movie. It doesn’t drag & every scene feels important. It’s not rushed but it moves the plot along nicely resulting in a payoff that is totally worth it. I love practical monster effects & we get some good ones here as well as comeuppance for everyone involved.

A worthy watch even if it’s showing its age now.