The Bride of Frank (1996)

Director: Steve Ballot

Screenplay: Steve Ballot; Allan Galperin; Billy Moran and Alley Ninestein

Cast: Frank Meyer as Frank; John Kolendriski as Johnny Horizon; Rena Ballot as Miss Grimble; Arnell Dowret as Dennis / Mother; Steve Ballot as Vichelli; Eric Kaplan       as Tony the Thumb; Eddie Regan as Louie the Loan; Sal Mogavero as Sal the Mouth; Bernard Briley as Bernard the Tongue; Sergio Lopez as El Pulpo; Chick Carter as The Nerd / Edna / Bob; Alley Ninestein as Aphrodite

The best way to describe The Bride of Frank is what happens if Jim Hoskins' The Greasy Strangler (2016), a divisive film based upon awkward torturous comedy and strange grotesque humour, wasn't deliberately made to be provocative by someone more known for watching art films but an entirely unknown quandary whose awareness of the joke cannot be attained, but making a vulgar film for the hell of it. Certainly, this was a passion project as director/co-writer/co-star Steve Ballot never made anything else after.

Though its ultimately revealed as a dream sequence, the opening where an old dishevelled man (who we will come to know is the titular Frank) picks up a young girl in a truck, gets angry when she doesn't want to kiss him, and runs the child over with fake head crushing practical effects gives away what to expect with this dirty little micro budget production.

Shot in New York City, this old man when he wakes up is revealed to be a formerly homeless man who works at a trucking company, the kind of man who hordes cats in the office he is allowed to live in and washes his underwear (still covered in brown strains) with a toothbrush. Frank is clearly played by a non-actor, who they even have to subtitle onscreen as his voice can be difficult to discern. From then on, don't expect the politically correct and always expect the unexpected as, grimier than a sewage pipe, along with his friend and colleagues Frank goes on his way to his desire of meeting a girl with big breasts, to the point of his manager putting a dating ad in a newspaper. Unfortunately for any woman who follows through with the ad and meets him, anyone who angers him he kills, all with a super strength that is belied by him visibly being an older man who has lived.  

Clearly not shot on video, but with computer added text onscreen of the era, you could also make comparisons to John Waters but this film is considerably meaner. Waters for all the transgression he had in his work, infamously managing to convince real life friend Divine to eat actual dog faeces on camera, still loved even reprobates and deviants, a kind man with a big perverse heart. The Bride of Frank feels nastier, where there's grotesqueness in how characters are depicted until a major plot I will talk about later. At first, it's really sordid. Be it the woman who answers Frank's ad being a gay stereotype in disguise that gets beat up and mutilated, played by an actor who earlier played a stereotypical geek who gets maimed and killed for wandering in on Frank's birthday party and insulting him. Or the manager being slime as he tricks a Jewish woman by claiming to be Frank and even pretending to be a Jewish mother, in-between gross close ups of his teeth, affirming Frank is a stand out guy. Or the childhood flashback for Frank which gets weird. I think in truth a lot of this film's content it is tonally inconsistent with itself or with a heavy reliance on shock without camp.

Some of it would just come off as being meant to be funny in a way that's questionable now, like that gay stereotype, but other aspects revealed complicate this film considerably. A tangent of a bed ridden old woman ringing Frank is a sweet moment which catches you off guard. That the band at the end scene at a wedding includes guys in drag does so to, or that Frank's mother is also played by a man. The scene stealing actress who, though her song to Frank that he's not her type is cruel, is actually sung by her in a full operetta voice whilst she even juggles halfway through was glorious to see. Then there's the fact that, whilst Frank is played as a monster for most of the film, he does meet his true love in a woman in her fifties or sixties, which to any viewer's surprise leads to an actual happy ending which is totally incongruous in how sweet it is, with a day out in local New York City on the streets for good measure.

Really the issue here is whether it was all intentionally shocking, in on the joke and/or if everyone's aware of the joke. The Bride of Frank does not have a retrospective documentary, so you have to ask how with some difficult what is deliberately knowing shock value, as with a film like Street Trash (1987) which was purposely out to offend everyone and has a retrospective documentary, and what might've been the people on the set improvising with what they have. This tonal shift issue is a virtue to wanting to see where The Bride of Frank does next, but a huge flaw too as it also means you have to ask what the point was.

Unlike even a Street Trash, closer to John Waters, is that whilst the acting can be rough, and a few people need onscreen subtitles, a commitment to casting people who you rarely see in Hollywood and even b-movies cinema is a virtue. This is real New York here, places rarely seen in dank alleyways and streets people work on, where the most glamorous person is an erotic female dancer, likely a real employee whose job is that. A lot of it is natural, both in grossness in the literal cat shit in the corridor sort of way, the natural interesting world in the carnival attraction Frank brings his romantic interest to. This if anything else is the real thing to take from The Bride of Frank as it's not exactly abstract, mostly a string of scenes strung together only to eventually tie together somehow, still memorable regardless of this. Authentic grime, just odd to witness and your acquired tastes would have to be very specific for this to work in any way.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Grotesque/Psychotronic/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None