Frankenhooker

• Frankenhooker was Henenlotter's most expensive film to that point - in interviews he's pegged the budget at 'a million-five,' a fortune next to the cobbled-together $35,000 Basket Case that launched him in 1982. It was produced and distributed by Shapiro-Glickenhaus Entertainment.
• The makeup effects came from Gabe Bartalos, who'd already built the brain-creature for Henenlotter's Brain Damage and would go on to do Basket Case 2 and Basket Case 3 with him - here churning out the stitched limbs, the talking severed head in the jar, and the exploding bodies.
• The MPAA wouldn't give it an R and hit it with an X over the gore, drugs and sex; rather than cut it, the producers released it Unrated, which locked it out of most mainstream theaters. Henenlotter loves telling how a ratings-board rep phoned to say 'Congratulations, you're the first film rated S' - the letter standing for something a lot blunter than 'sexual.'
• The infamous VHS box quote - 'If you only see one movie this year, it should be Frankenhooker' - is credited to Bill Murray, who was editing Quick Change at the same facility; per Henenlotter the line came after the distributor pestered Murray's office for an endorsement, and he finally gave it.
• The Shapiro-Glickenhaus VHS box itself talked: a button and sound chip on the cover triggered the film's signature line, 'Wanna date?' - one of the loudest gimmick releases of the early-90s rental era.
• Lead Patty Mullen came from Penthouse - Pet of the Month for August 1986 and Pet of the Year in 1988 - and Frankenhooker stands as her one and only starring film role (her only other acting credit was a supporting turn in 1987's Doom Asylum).

Strip the splatter and it's a story about a man who cannot accept his partner as a person, only as parts. Jeffrey keeps Elizabeth's head talking in a jar but treats the rebuild as a shopping trip for the body he prefers - the film makes his 'love' indistinguishable from ownership, and the monster he resurrects is a woman assembled entirely to male specification who then turns the predation back on men.

The exploding-hooker setpiece reads as a deliberately tasteless cartoon of the real crack epidemic chewing through New York's most disposable women in the late 80s. By staging their deaths as firecracker slapstick instead of tragedy, the movie dares you to laugh at exactly the population the city had already written off - the joke is on the viewer who finds it funny.

Mullen's reborn Elizabeth - the lurching gait, the short-circuiting face, the flat repetition of corner patter - turns the 'sexy monster' into something genuinely unsettling: she's running borrowed muscle memory from the dead women whose parts built her. The performance suggests there's no single person in there at all, just a committee of murdered strangers still trying to finish their last transaction.

A lawnmower takes Jeffrey Franken's fiancee apart at a backyard party, and the failed med student keeps her head alive in a jar while he shops for a new body. His plan: lure Times Square sex workers with cash, dose them with homemade "super crack," and harvest the pieces that don't detonate. The drug works too well, the women blow apart in a strobe-lit firestorm, and Jeffrey stitches Elizabeth back together wrong. What lurches off his slab is a stammering, electrode-twitching predator who still works the corners - soliciting men, then frying them.