MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Frankenhooker’: A Fun Slice of American Gothic

Frank Henenlotter’s hilarious, totally outrageous grin-and-gore comedy “Frankenhooker� takes over tonight as the Nuart’s Friday midnight offering, replacing his “Basket Case 2.�

It couldn’t be more appropriate, because “Frankenhooker� is just as gleefully perverse as his “Basket Case� pictures. Shocks-and-yocks is what midnight shows are all about, and the gifted Henenlotter supplies plenty of both.

Even before New Jersey power-plant worker Jeffrey Franken (James Lorinz) loses his pretty but plumpish fiancee Elizabeth (Patty Mullen) to a runaway lawn mower, you know he’s weird, a guy who’s been thrown out of three medical schools and whose garage workshop/lab features a tank containing what looks to be the living brain of a Cyclops.

Now Jeffrey has managed to salvage Elizabeth’s severed head, and tries to improve upon nature by assembling a new body for her from parts of New York’s sexiest streetwalkers.

Much of what happens defies description in its sheer grisliness, but never for a second do Henenlotter and co-writer Robert Martin lose their all-crucial sense of humor. Henenlotter may have had in mind a homage to Herschel Gordon Lewis’ cult classic “Blood Feast.� However, where that film is disturbingly morbid in its sex-and-violence equation, Henenlotter makes a comic point of Jeffrey’s puritanism and its bizarre consequences. Also, “Frankenhooker� (Times-rated Mature) has lots of fun presenting an exaggerated fantasy view of big, bad Manhattan.

As usual, Henenlotter gets extraordinarily well-sustained, straight-faced portrayals from his stars--and in this instance provides cameos for Louise Lasser as Jeffrey’s doting, innocent mother and Shirley Stoler as the thought-she’d-seen-it-all proprietor of the lowest dive in New York. No doubt about it, Henenlotter is an original, coming up with a piece of American Gothic that has the primitive energy of Sam Fuller and the dark humor of David Lynch.