January 21, 2016

As a full-fledged movie fanatic AND horror appreciator, I’m always looking for the perfect combination of movies to pair up together as a double feature. When you meet a fellow horror lover, often times there will be at least one title that you’ve never heard of (or that they’ve never heard of) and that’s usually the ideal “double bill.” Or sometimes you hunt for various themes and wonder if they’d play together well for a group of people. If you’re really ambitious? You aim for the triple bill.

I love FRANKENSTEIN. Everyone does. It has always had such a rich history cinematically. Ever since the very beginning of filmmaking, everyone has taken their hand at adapting Mary Shelley’s legendary novel, starting with Edison’s 1910 16 minute short film version of FRANKENSTEIN. So since the dawn of filmmaking, people have been compelled to retell this particular story.

You can fill up books probably with tons of examples of films where your lead character has a Doctor Frankenstein complex and is attempting to resurrect the deceased. But I guarantee you, none of them would be as fun as the following three movies that are destined to play together.

If you’re looking for the ultimate and thoroughly entertaining FRANKENSTEIN inspired triple bill, might I suggest queueing up RE-ANIMATOR, followed by FRANKENHOOKER, and closing it out with WEIRD SCIENCE. Am I right?

RE-ANIMATOR

Best way to kick off the night is with Stuart Gordon’s 1985 gore classic RE-ANIMATOR. It’s sure to set the mood for the entire evening. Based upon the H.P. Lovecraft short story, Gordon and screenwriter Dennis Paoli expand upon the text to create a story of love, death and how the two can inadvertently collide!

Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott) has got it pretty good. He’s a well-respected med student. He’s got a gorgeous girlfriend Meg (Barbara Crampton) and an ambition to help people. It’s hard for him to let go when it comes to losing his patients. Enter Herbert West (a scene stealing Jeffrey Combs), his new roommate who may be a bit off-kilter, but it obviously a genius. Working closely with Dr. Hans Gruber, he has managed to create a fluorescent green fluid that enables re-animation in dead tissue! The problem is, it doesn’t exactly work for long periods of time. And it’s highly illegal. Annnnnnnd usually when people come back from the dead, they’re ridiculously pissed and well… kind of gross.

RE-ANIMATOR is fun, gory, over-the-top and at times hilarious. It’s the perfect FRANKENSTEIN-esque film to kick off any proper movie night.

FRANKENHOOKER

Next up, let’s up the gross out factor and make it even more weird & hilarious with Frank Henenlotter’s 1990 cult classic FRANKENHOOKER! Jeffrey Franken (James Lorinz) is a brilliant former medical student that now pays his bills as an electrician. But when his beloved fiancé gets shredded to pieces in a freak remote control lawnmower accident, he can’t live without her, hence he vows to somehow bring her back.

All he has is her head, so he heads to the streets of New York City and meets with a group of prostitutes in the hopes of assembling the perfect body for her. He can’t decide, but it doesn’t matter, because the angry hookers end up taking a deadly batch of Super Crack and explode! Now with a plethora of female body parts, he’s decided to use the best bits of all of them to bring back his bride-to-be. But when he does, unfortunately some of the personalities of the girls are still there and Elizabeth (Patty Mullen) returns to the streets “looking for some action.”

After the madness that is RE-ANIMATOR, I can think of no better way to follow it up than with FRANKENHOOKER, the movie that Bill Murray once said was the “one movie” you had to see that year.

WEIRD SCIENCE

Last but not least, you have to close the night out strong. And you can’t go wrong with a little John Hughes. So fitting with the “Frankenstein” theme, the third film in our triple bill has to be my personal favorite of Hughes filmography WEIRD SCIENCE. Gary (Anthony Michael Hall) and Wyatt (Ilan Mitchell-Smith) are dorks. Quite possible the biggest dorks in all of Shermer, Illinois history. But history is about to change!

Inspired by a late night TV airing of FRANKENSTEIN during a sleep over, they’re going to apply their computer wizardry to making a girl, from scratch! The fiction in science-fiction for this particular one is pretty huge, but culled from old Playboy magazines, they manage to make Lisa, played to perfection by Kelly LeBrock. But Lisa isn’t at all what they expected and she challenges them at every step of the way to teach them how to come out of their shells and defend their honor.

I have literally seen WEIRD SCIENCE hundreds of times. I’ve watched it at home alone, with groups of friends and on the big screen at revival screenings and every single time, it kills. Paired up with RE-ANIMATOR and FRANKENHOOKER, I think that makes for the most fun and weird FRANKENSTEIN triple bill in history! Enjoy it, fiends!