Frankenhooker (1990)

An absurdist slapstick black comedy about a Jersey kid, Jeffrey, who does mad scientist body experiments in his parents' kitchen, and is forced to take it to the next level when the remote controlled lawnmower that he built for his dad accidentally mows over his fiancée.

I've got nothing better going on, laying here dying of viral infection, so I double-featured it with itself: with and without director's commentary. Henenlotter circa 2005 will definitely have something insightful to say about Frankenhooker, right? Holy cow, he can talk. "Just speed-talking like an idiot," he says. He really talks exactly like the stereotypical film director. He has an effects guy with him, but he interrupts and talks over him every time. He interrupts and talks over himself, too.

The police officer being interviewed on the TV news mentions that several body parts, including the head, are mysteriously missing. Deep, bassy digital organs boom thunderously as her fiancé frantically sketches the design of an electrical woman on paper. His disappointed but oblivious mom tries to get him to accept that she's dead and get back into the dating pool. He tells her that he's lost the ability to tell good from evil, right from wrong, and she offers him a sandwich.

He's keeping her bits in a tank in the garage. He hosts romantic dinner dates down there for her lifeless head, pouring wine into her mouth such that it pours right back out of her severed neck. "Somebody has to die for you to live," he tells a photograph of her glued to a plastic skeleton. He drills holes in his own skull to relax.

Henenlotter says "I never, never, never wanted this to be a gore film." He said he came up with the crack idea when walking to work, as he had to step over broken crack pipes and used condoms from the prostitution that took place in front of their building every night. "Once we came up with super crack, then it was easy." Apparently they shot it in 6 weeks, which is quite impressive.

He heads down to the city and tries to hire six prostitutes, but they make him come into the seedy club to meet their pimp first, who operates out of a highly debaucherous bathroom office. He takes more than six home and holds a body part competition, carefully observing and choosing his favorite parts from each of the women.

Henenlotter excitedly says the prostitutes on the street were real prostitutes on the Upper West Side, filmed without permission from the side of a panel van. He said it was impossible to find "SAG girls" willing to play in the film, so they instead invited a bunch of Playmates and strippers into the Screen Actors Guild.

He can't bring himself to murder directly, so he designs "super crack" with the intention of convincing prostitutes to overdose under their own free will. He tests it by pumping it into the cage of an adorable long-haired guinea pig, which violently explodes into four quarters. He has a change of heart, but it's too late: the prostitutes find the super crack, partake, and explode into thousands of bits. He reluctantly returns home with piles and piles of severed body parts in trash bags.

Henenlotter says the MPAA made them remove X amounts of drug shots, X amounts of boobs, and X amounts of exploding women. However many exploding women they had, the MPAA demanded one fewer exploding women. It's good to know the MPAA has our backs. The effects guy says he wanted to do better than mannequins with roman candles in them, but they intentionally went for the fake look to satisfy the censors.

He stitches them all together in his ridiculous lab, which is all fine and dandy but does drag on. It culminates into a classic Frankenstein reanimation process: corpse on a rising table with a lighting rod, elevated out of the open barn doors on the ceiling and into a violent electrical storm.

The all new Elizabeth, his fiancée, awakens as a crudely stitched together monstrosity a la Sally from Nightmare Before Christmas. To his chagrin, she has the mind and memory of a streetwalker rather than his beloved; she knocks him out and goes to walk the streets.

Like many reconstructed women, she can't bend at the knee. But when she touches johns, they fill with artificial lightning and explode into bits. She robotically repeats an amalgamation of sentences said by any of the girls earlier in the movie.

Jeffrey goes out looking for her, asking random passersby if they have seen a scarified purple beast woman. They aren't very helpful. "What are you, some kind of a Swede? You're talking to me in Swedish in Times Square!" he shouts at one particularly unhelpful man in a Batman t-shirt.

It's not too bad, within the frame of a low-budget slapstick sci-fi farce with unprofessional actors. It's very prop-based, and happily the props are fantastic. But each and every scene is just is a little bit less interesting than it is long.

Zorro the pimp tracks Jeffrey down to his lab and kills him. The malformed bestial bits of all of the other hookers crawl out of the refrigerator and drag him in.

Elizabeth pieces Jeffrey back together, taking some creative liberties.