The Bride of Frank (1996)

The Bride of Frank (1996)

Frank (Frank Meyer) is an old, toothless, depleted scarecrow of a human being, working in a warehouse close to the New Jersey harbor. The movie starts with our friend Frank telling us that this is a story of love and evil, before we witness him luring a girl into his trailer to knock her skull with a club. He puts her on the ground to taste her blood, before he drives over her head and eats a chunk of her scattered brain. This was only a dream sequence, by the way. Frank wakes up in his bed in an office in the warehouse, where he lives with his cat, and washes his skid-marked underwear with his toothbrush. Eww..

 

His coworkers, who mainly treats him like a dog, decides to be a little nice to old Frankie for a change by arranging his upcoming birthday party. A very bizarre event, to say the least, where a random guy comes in, dressed like a nerd with rabbit teeth and big glasses trying to ruin the party by throwing insulting comments at Frank. The coworkers wraps the guy into plastic, and gives Frank the great honor of cutting his head off with a knife. Afterwards, Frank takes a shit on the remains. Happy Birthday. He didn’t get what he wished for, though, which was tits. They make up for this the next day by taking him to a cheap strip club that makes him more obsessed with tits than ever, and he starts talking about nothing but tits. “Tits! I really want tits! Tits! Big tits!” He wants big tits as much as a junkie craves for heroine. Frank’s boss puts an ad in the newspaper, and Frank makes himself ready to date some…big tits.

 

There isn’t much progress to talk about in this rather shoddy underground film, and you get the impression that the movie was shot with complete improvisation by the actors, probably with a script that was scribbled on a toilet paper as they went along. We’re 47 minutes in before the funniest scenes starts, where we finally see Frank’s first date. Which of course goes from bad to worse, where Frank discards the ladies by killing them if they don’t meet his standards, while the poor cat is being a witness to it all. Frank Meyer is the high light here. He is an absurd nutcase of a character to look at, falling in and out of consciousness as he mutters his dialogues, assumingly with a whole cocktail of chemicals running through his fragile body. Or maybe just drunk as a sailor, who knows. Nevertheless, he’s pure comedy gold and the only reason to give The Bride of Frank a watch. Frank Meyer obviously didn’t win an Oscar for his performance, and this is the only film he’s appeared in. You can hear him sharing a commentary on the DVD with the director and some other dude, where he is, I suspect, the one who inhales from the bubbling crack pipe.

 

The Bride of Frank

 

Director: Steve Ballot
Country & year: USA, 1996
Actors: Morgan Tara, Frank Meyer, John Kolendriski, Victor Delvalle, Bruce Frankel, Jim Moresca, Rena Ballot, Arnell Dowret, Steve Ballot, Eric Kaplan, Eddie Regan, Sal Mogavero, Bernard Briley, Sergio Lopez, Charles Gambino
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0261587/

 

Tom Ghoul