Minor Horror #7: The Bride of Frank

This is the seventh in a series of fifteen pieces on “minor” horror films that I’m going to be publishing here throughout October. For more information, please see this post.

The Bride of Frank (Steve Ballot, 1996)

You don’t need to look up the production history to know that Frank is a real hobo. The lines on his face are too deep, his speech too genuinely weather-beaten. He carries himself with the brittle rigidity of a man who would be as surprised as you that he’s still alive, if he could afford the luxury of being surprised by anything – like Herzog’s Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, this is a movie built around the authentic estrangement of its lead actor from normative social being. If Frank is not truly impoverished and street-hardened, if he is not truly “about that life”, so to speak, the whole project becomes incoherent – this is the logic of the freak show, of course, and we should remain conscious of that. But, equally, we should remember there was a time when such attractions offered glimpses of a truth otherwise kept hidden from view.

The Bride of Frank is not, beyond its title, the slightest bit related to The Bride of Frankenstein. There’s no mad scientist here, no reanimated creations – Frank is just a dirty old man who sleeps in the office space at a shipping warehouse and helps with deliveries during the day. Like the five cats he shares the cubicles and conference rooms with, he’s a stray who’s found shelter under the apparently genuine benevolence of the warehouse dispatcher and his crew of vulgar, greasy blue-collar stereotypes. He also kills and mutilates a number of women viciously and without remorse, for reasons related to his childhood, but probably not in the way you’re assuming. Were it not for this particular aspect of his character, it would be hard to call the movie a work of horror at all. Shot with a certain demonic flair on appropriately ugly consumer-grade video, its closest reference point in the SOV canon is probably Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend, a perverse anti-romcom about a loser who sits around his shitty apartment watching porn and hiring call girls and feeling sorry for himself. That film has a vibe somewhere between a bad joke and a suicide note, erectile dysfunction in cinematic form. The Bride of Frank makes a slightly different ask of its audience: that we believe that this decrepit old man, despite all odds, actually can still get it up.

It is difficult to talk about The Bride of Frank in a coherent way because it is difficult to get a handle on what exactly it is. Its parts don’t quite fit together in the normal fashion, and when you try to add them up it seems to come out both more and less than their sum depending on how light is hitting it. The point, on some level, is clearly just to shock, to say “look at this weird fuckin’ old guy and all the sick, dirty shit he was down to do for our movie” – this is the sense in which it is a gross-out comedy, a compilation of gonzo skits, a precursor to Bumfights. But then, not a lot really happens in The Bride of Frank. He dreams he eats a little girl’s brains, wakes up, forgets about it. He cuts a guy’s dick off. He has a birthday party, where he beheads a man with buck teeth and Austin Powers glasses to the cheers of his co-workers. Then he decides he wants a girl, and the rest of the movie is taken up by this quest – with the dispatcher’s help, he places a personal ad, and the replies start coming in. A pattern is established: a woman comes to the office and meets Frank; either she rejects him, or he rejects her, and then she either runs away or is killed. This is the sense in which it is a horror movie: the monotony, the repetition, the droning inevitability. When Frank kills a woman it means nothing; the movie treats them as disposable and demands that you do so as well. His co-workers all know what he’s up to and none of them care, preferring to spend their time trading homophobic banter so sexually charged it’s a miracle they don’t start jerking each other off right then and there. It’s not that these are immoral characters so much as the entire universe seems completely amoral – everyone basically just acts however they feel like and none of it really matters. There is no weight, no consequence. Things just happen and they aren’t good or bad, the fuck are you talking about, shut up. And then, just to drive the point home, it has a happy ending. Frank finds a bride. Who is any of this for? What is its purpose? These are not answerable questions for a movie like this. They are not really even meaningful. This is the difficulty in trying to write about it.

Frank spends a lot of time watching TV. He doesn’t like any shows in particular, just “whatever’s on”. Perhaps there is a lesson in this.