Frankenhooker is a 1990 American black comedy horror film directed by Frank Henenlotter. Very loosely inspired by Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, the film stars James Lorinz as medical school drop-out Jeffrey Franken and former Penthouse Pet Patty Mullen as the title character (who wears a fatsuit in the beginning of the film).
Plot[]
Jeffrey Franken, a young man who lives in New Jersey, is a worker at a power plant who also specializes as a bioelectrical scientist. He is about to be married to his fiancée Elizabeth, an overweight woman who has tried dieting but seen no results. At Elizabeth's father's birthday party, Jeffrey presents him with an automatic lawnmower as a gift, but when Elizabeth tries to demonstrate it, she is caught in its path and gruesomely killed.
Jeffrey, in his grief, begins plotting to use his knowledge of circuits to rebuild Elizabeth and bring her back to life. His grief drives him to have mock dinner dates with the few pieces of Elizabeth he could salvage, as well as giving himself trepans with a power drill to help him calm down. He decides to make the perfect new body for Elizabeth by harvesting the body of a New York City prostitute.
After meeting several girls and their abusive pimp Zorro, a muscle-bound temperamental crack dealer, Jeffrey tricks Zorro into letting him rent every one of the girls for a single night to find the one with the perfect body for Elizabeth. Inspired by a news report about crack cocaine causing the deaths of many New York prostitutes, he then develops a "super-crack" which he finds causes living beings to explode. Deciding he's doing nothing wrong as crack will probably kill the prostitutes anyway, Jeffrey lures the prostitutes into a hotel room under the guise of a "medical examination" and marks the girls with the body parts he wants for Elizabeth. However, as he begins to have second thoughts, the prostitutes all find the bag of super-crack and all smoke it despite Jeffrey's pleas, causing them all to explode into pieces.
Zorro hears the commotion and rushes to the room only to be knocked out by one of the flying heads of his girls. Jeffrey hurriedly puts the body parts in trash bags, promising to restore the girls once he brings Elizabeth back. After picking the perfect parts and sewing them and Elizabeth's head into a single body, Jeffrey uses a storm to shock Elizabeth's new body to life again. However, her body and face move awkwardly, and she can only repeat what the previous girls said before they died. The "Frankenhooker" escapes the basement and begins looking for customers, who end up exploding from electricity when they try getting intimate with her.
Jeffrey goes looking for Elizabeth and finds her at a bar. Unfortunately, Zorro is there too, and upon hearing her mention his name and recognizing her body parts, he angrily strikes her so hard that her head mostly detaches from her body. Jeffrey evades Zorro and takes Elizabeth home to repair her neck and revive her again.
After bolting her head more securely to her new body, Jeffrey wakes Elizabeth up, finding her memory restored. At first, Elizabeth is impressed that Jeffrey brought her back, but becomes furious when she realizes what her body is now made of and how Jeffrey obtained the parts. Jeffrey tries to explain himself, but he is attacked and decapitated by Zorro, who's followed him home. Zorro then attempts to drag Elizabeth away with him, justifying himself by claiming that most of her new body belongs to him. However, the spare hooker parts have also been reanimated by the storm and merged into multiple grotesque-limbed monsters, which overwhelm Zorro and drag him away into their storage cooler to his presumable death, along with his drugs.
Elizabeth decides to revive Jeffrey via the same procedure he used on her, but since the process only works on female bodies, Elizabeth is forced to put Jeffrey's head on a body made of the hookers' body parts to bring him back. As Jeffrey awakens, Elizabeth happily says they'll be together forever as Jeffrey moans in horror at his new female body.