ZomBlog Review: "Frankenhooker"

“Frankenhooker”
1990
U.S.
Stars: James Lorinz, Patty Mullen, Charlotte Helmkamp, Louise Lasser, Jennifer Delora
Writer: Robert Martin and Frank Henenlotter
Dir: Frank Henenlotter
85 minutes

It is not often I can watch a movie I know is crap and still recommend it. Just about everything Frank Henenlotter has directed could be called a crappy film — but they each have just enough of the right elements to make them tolerable and, dare I say, fun.
I have been beaten down over and over again for loving “Brain Damage.” I have taken a lot of guff for enjoying “Basket Case.” And I’ve been kicked in the teeth for praising this terrible gem.
And, yes, it is bad — but so bad it is good.
I keep looking back at the past two months of reviews on this site and think, “The few readers/subscribers we have must check this blog and think to themselves, ‘When in the fuck are they going to talk about zombies again?’ ”
I promise, this is simply housecleaning.
I am a Facebook-rat. I admit, I get lonely and sometimes virtually reach-out to like-minded horror fans. I get about four to ten suggestions a month of, “Hey, have you checked this out?” Sometimes I simply say, “Yes, we reviewed it, here is the link, enjoy!” Other times I say, “Hmm, that might actually be interesting.”
Here is one of those latter instances.
I own “Frankenhooker” on DVD. I should be ashamed. I’m not. After Andrew did such respectable job examining the Frankenstein-undead/zombie inspiration, I pretty much disregarded anything Frankie-like.
But, you know, when an entire film is dedicated to an undead hooker, exploding crack-heads, and features a pre-porn career Heather Hunter, I have to dive in and argue it needs to appear here, even if it is only loosely married to zombie-lore.
“Frankenhooker” is itself a cult classic, something you would have expected to see Gilbert Gottfried and Rhonda Shear hosting on USA “Up All Night” in the early ’90s. I am sure it was featured at one point.
After gifting a self-propelled lawnmower to his fiancée’s father, which promptly runs over his hilariously “plump” lady, Jeffrey Franken (Lorinz), a nerdy and awkward inventor, sets his mind to bring back to life his severed bride. After Elizabeth Shelley’s (Mullen) accidental pre-nuptial death-by-lawn-utensil, Franken collects the salvageable pieces, including her head, and stores them in an icebox full of bubbling, electrified purple Kool-Aid. In the meantime, he goes searching for possible body parts, including using his life’s savings to rent a room full of New York hookers from a muscle-bound pimp in order to shop for the perfect parts. But when they discover he brought along his secret “re-agent,” a sparkling basketball-sized crystal of what they dub “super-crack,” all bets — and heads — are off. After a hilarious display of exploding hookers, Franken gathers up what he can salvage from Hookershima, and sets to rebuild his fiancée from the ’sploded parts. And, well, when he gets his girl back together, she greets him with a slew of the most familiar movie hooker pick-up lines — “Wanna date? Wanna go out? Got any money?” — with hilarious, robotic delivery. I must apologize, my friends, but when the newly minted Elizabeth shows up, and shows all her “quirks,” I can’t help but smile.
Oh, and Jeffrey must find a way to deal with/confine his new creation, even if she is going around New Your City and making Johns explode everywhere (no, that is not a euphemism.).
Beating “Bride of Re-Animator” by a couple months, and trailing the original premise of “Frankenstein” by nearly 60 years, “Frankenhooker” expands on the idea of collecting multiple body parts, each of those parts having an individual trait carried over from whence it came, and the composite of those parts struggling to find a collective identity. That might seem a bit heady and existential, but, nah, not for this movie. Henenlotter doesn’t go for deep meanings. He went for cheap laughs. And I was a sucker for them then and remain so now.
Looking back, it seems the “Frankenstein” grave had somewhat of a small robbery around 1990, with the Jeff Fahey/Brad Dourif starrer “Body Parts” also coming out around the same time and only a few short years later the Kenneth Branaugh/Robert DeNiro “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” (which, I, um, also kinda like). “Frankenhooker” is laughs first, gore second, and story third. It hangs together with loose stitches, but, hell, you weren’t expecting “The Godfather” with that title, were you?

Romero Rules Followed: Uh, none
Gore factor: Surprisingly little despite the amount of exploding bodies involved.
Zombies or Wannabees? The ending is open for argument, but, overall, wannabees.
Classic, fine, or waste of time: Fine (on the overall cult-status scale, it is a classic)
Additional comments: Look, “Frankenhooker” is a guilty pleasure. I’m sorry. But, meet me back here next week for part one of an exhaustive analysis of Season 1 of “The Walking Dead.”
And, oh yeah, might have had an issue or two with that one...
— ROB

Feed My Frankenstein

We here Zomblog International HQ made the official determination that while Frankenstein’s monster is a clear antecedent to the zombie uprising, Ol’ Frank just doesn’t make the cut himself. It’s no insult, we’re just sayin’ more brain munching would have helped. Japan, land of all things thoroughly awesome, has adopted Frankenstein as the central metaphor for a rack of films that also fall just short of true zombie g(l)ory. Here are three reanimated and bloody features that swipe from Mary Shelley’s playbook.

RoboGeisha
Dir. Noboru Iguchi
2009
Yoshie is the ugly duckling younger sister of a local geisha and constant butt of her abuse. The beatings have left her with a substantial case of barely contained rage and the ability to rip phonebooks in half with her bare hands. The corrupt local munitions company plays on the sibling rivalry to recruit Yoshie into their coterie of highly trained geisha assassins, whose bodies have been largely roboticized and sent out into the world to kill off political rivals. That is until a collection of local activists convince Yoshie her bosses aren’t who they seem. Subsequent absurdities include acidic breast milk, Gatling tits, shuriken spewing sphincters and a giant robot castle dancing the robot. That and a shitload of CGI gore.

Full Metal Yakuza
Dir. Takashi Miike
1997
Kensuke is not a very good yakuza. In fact, his pathetic incompetence sees him summarily gunned down early on in this Frankenstein by way of RoboCop mashup from Takashi Miike, the enfant terrible of 1990s Japanese cinema. Left to be harvested for his organs, Kensuke is revived by a local mad scientist who turns him into a metallicized kill-borg with a robowang that puts Tetsuo the Ironman to shame. Unfortunately, true to the Frankenstein mold, Kensuke spends most of the flick pondering his miserable, unnatural existence rather than wreaking bloody vengeance on the gangsters who left his ass for dead.

Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl
Dirs. Yoshihiro Nishimura and Naoyuki Tomomatsu
2009
Frankenstein’s Monster and Count Dracula have squared off in many a moldy screen oldie. This 90 minute trip through the fine art of arterial spray posits the good count as a shy, sun adverse transfer student to a Japanese high school who squares off with a reanimated posse of mean girls. Yes it’s about a boy. He’s so dreamy. Yoshihiro Nishimura, who directed Tokyo Gore Police and contributed blood ‘n’ guts to RoboGeisha, co-chaired this gory, gory outing. But if you want to appreciate the Raimi-style bloody humor, you’re also gonna have to subject yourself to the Japanese attempt at racial humor. Japanese girls in blackface. With giant lips. And bones in their noses. And lip plates. Chanting songs about Obama. *sigh* This one is for the dedicated only.

ZomBlog Review: "Re-Animator"

“Re-Animator”
1985
U.S.
Stars: Bruce Abbott, Barbara Crampton, David Gale, Robert Sampson and Jeffrey Combs
Writer: Dennis Paoli, William J. Norris and Stuart Gordon; Based on the story “Herbert West: Re-animator” by H.P. Lovecraft
Dir: Stuart Gordon
86 minutes

Herbert West is a strange little man. He is manipulative, argumentative, a chronic liar, asexual, and has criminal tendencies.
He’s also brilliant and has figured out a way to bring the dead back to life.
Having a reason to flee Sweden, where he claims he had nothing left to learn, West (Combs) arrives at Miskatonic University in Massachusetts (a staple of the Gordon-made Lovecraft movies and a handful of the writer’s stories), where he meets medical student, the overly passionate Dan Cain (Abbott). Cain, engaged to the dean’s daughter (Crampton) is a sure-fire star of his medical school — until West comes knocking, looking for a room to rent and the basement for laboratory space. Cain, desperate for cash and looking to further impress Dean Halsey, accepts West into his home, despite his girlfriend’s, Megan Halsey’s, protests.
Meanwhile, West attends school and immediately begins a war with the established and well-respected Dr. Hill (Gale, in a brilliant and brave performance), accusing Hill of stealing ideas from more intelligent physicians over the location of “the will in the brain,” where brain death occurs and if, after a matter of minutes, if the salvation of life is even possible. West argues brain death can be reversed, while Hill claims it ends after seven minutes. And, as the audience already knows, West has proven his theory — well, technically.
West has created a “re-agent,” a serum, once injected into a dead body, re-animates the victim. However, his results seem to be the same: the subject does come back to life — but they seem none too pleased about it, act like rage victims, and have gained the strength of five men.
As Hill’s obsession of Megan Halsey grows, as does his obsession over learning what West has discovered, ultimately attempting to steal West’s discovery and claim it as his own. Well, for fear of ruining this great, bloody mind-numbing feast, I will go no further.
“Re-Animator” remains one of my all-time horror film favorites. I first saw it by skipping out of class on an afternoon my freshman year of high school and hitting a video store with a pal (yes, mom, I did occasionally miss a few minutes of school). And, yes, we instantly loved it. And, while I have no idea where that guy is nowadays, I am sure he probably still talks this one up as much as I do. It is another example of where horror, gore, and dark comedy can perfectly overlap and entertain. “Re-Animator” is held up with a solid set of actors (Combs and Gale serving up great performances as outcast likeable jerk, and evil, sadistic, flawed-villain, respectively), a solid musical score (obviously ripping off and riffing on the famous Bernard Herrmann score for Hitchcock’s “Psycho”), and a good mix of furiously fast-paced sequences. And the ending is memorable as well.
Soooooo …

Romero Rules Followed: 2 out of 5
Gore factor: Bucketloads; still one of the more heavily-censored films of the 80s, but available completely uncut on DVD.
Zombies or Wannabees?: Damn it, it’s hard, but the monsters in this flick are the recently undead. Zombies it is, although not by traditional Romero means. This one falls more in line with “Frankenstein.”
Classic, fine, or waste of time: Classic
Additional comments: Probably the only film you will ever see with a disembodied head giving … um … “head”…awkward and bizarre, but the moment it occurs is actually hilarious rather than terrifying. I may be sick in my head, but I still laugh when others cringe. And the question is also answered as to what happens when intestines live. There are two middling sequels to this flick. I recommend both for a variety of reasons, but the first is still a solid entry into the horror — and on a limited measure — into the zombie lexicon.

— ROB

Zombie or Wannabe: Frankenstein’s Monster

Were I to ask you about Frankenstein’s monster, most of you would probably begin rambling about green-skinned, bolt-necked monstrosities in orthopedic shoes played by English character actors in black and white films. As embodied by Boris Karloff – a lumbering, violent collection of spare body parts prone to bouts of grunting rage – Frankenstein’s monster would certainly seem to carry a strand of DNA that would later culminate in the modern zombie asthetic. The story in some form has been a screen staple for 80 years that is the image cemented indelibly in popular consciousness, but as originally conceived, Frankenstein is not the tale of white-coated mad scientists with hunchbacked servants and a conveniently lightning-adjacent castles. It’s far more gothic. And far more emo.
I’m a primary sources kinda motherfucker, so before judging whether the monster deserves a wing in the Zombie Hall of Fame I pored through Mary Shelley’s epistolary novel for the first time in more than a decade. Written in 1818 by a 19 year old Mary Shelley as the result of a gothic horror story-telling contest one drunken, stormy night with her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the mad, bad and dangerous to know Lord Byron, it’s the tale of Victor Frankenstein, a Swiss chemistry prodigy, who at 22 – an age when most modern students are only performing experiments with grain alcohol and the clap – is playing god and usurping the very secrets of life and death, stitching dissected corpse parts back together for his science fair project. No Igor, no lightning, Vic just gets all Lego with body parts in a spare room of the apartment he rents with murderously disastrous results.

The case for: From the moment the monster’s yellowed eyes silently pop open – sorry, no shouts of “It’s alive!” or lightning involved – Frankenstein is essentially a proto-zombie meditation on the ethics of transcending then-current human barriers of knowledge about the universe. Advance it 200 years, drop it in a military compound where an experiment is bound to end poorly, and we’re in fairly familiar territory here. In fact, the monster’s birth scene would make for a killer first zombie encounter in your next student film:

It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.
How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavored to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!—Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but the luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion and straight black lips.

One of the most interesting insights I gleaned is how Frankenstein manages to subvert a cliché that would not take root for another century and a half. Where pretty much every zombie story ever told has come down to a band of survivors fighting off overwhelming waves of organ hungry grave escapees, in Shelley’s tale it’s the monster that’s outnumbered and hunted by a superior force of vengeful humans bent on its destruction.

The case against: Though admittedly zombies, particularly as we conceive of them, were completely unknown to Shelley, she turns to other undead folkloric traditions to encapsulate the terror Victor feels in response to his creation. Such as in a scene after the monster murders his creator’s youngest brother:

I considered the being whom I had cast among mankind, and endowed with the will and power to effect purposes of horror, such as the deed which he had now done, nearly in the light of my own vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave, and forced to destroy all that was dear to me.

Later, the monster is described as “in colour and apparent texture like that of a mummy.
Also, it can’t be ignored that most canonical zombies are not as much of a whiney emo bitch as Frankenstein’s monster, who spends the bulk of the book loudly lamenting – yes, the monster can speak and even read – how, like, nobody totally gets him and he just doesn’t have any friends. That’s right, Frankenstein and his wrathful creation spend the better part of 200 pages trying to prove they’re more miserable and unloved and friendless than each other. If heartagram tattoos and anime haircuts had been known at the start of the 19th Century, you know damn well they’d be sporting them.
Compounding the problem, the monster teaches himself to read after unearthing a conveniently symbolic trove of books that consists of Paradise Lost (leading to a serious fallen angel-identification crisis), Plutarch’s Lives and Goerthe’s suicide encomium The Sorrows of Young Werther, sending him into paroxysms of self-loathing at great length.
In fact, the crux of conflict between the monster and his creator is the demand that Frankenstein build a lady monster to keep him company. Frankenstein’s reanimated abomination is far more interested in procreating his own species than bringing down the wrath of overflowing hell upon an actively hostile humanity.

The verdict: Not a zombie by reason of antiquity. No knock on Shelley’s sci-fi/horror/emo classic, but Frankenstein just exists in a different philosophical and cultural continuum. However, you do have to give it a nod of a squared off head for inspiring a series of films that would trickle down through the centuries, ultimately influencing the zombies we love today.