When a shy mortician's assistant, obsessed with the movie Frankenstein, accidentally injures a Boris Karloff lookalike he chooses to kidnap the man and put him back together using stolen body parts.

SYNOPSIS:

Small town USA, 1989. A young Henry Stein, son to an abusive father, finds solace in an old VHS copy of James Whale’s Frankenstein. He watches the movie on repeat to drown out his mother’s sobbing and his father’s drunken insults. The hulking monster on the silver screen is his only friend, no matter how imaginary.

Then, one night, driven to desperation, Henry saves his mother by killing his father. His mother helps Henry dump the body in the river before imparting a life lesson: sometimes it’s ok to do bad things for good reasons.

30 years later. Henry, now a successful surgeon in the city, returns home to spend his 40th birthday with his mother. While in town. Henry encounters Elsa, the pretty, kind-hearted girl he once knew from school. She invites Henry to the school reunion the following night.

However, the reunion doesn’t go so well when Henry discovers Elsa is engaged to Frank, the local womaniser who looks a lot like Boris Karloff. Henry doesn’t have long to ponder the man’s uncanny resemblance to his boyhood hero because Fraser, a bully as a boy and now a bully in a Sheriff’s uniform, reveals to the entire graduating class that Henry never actually finished medical school. He is still the same old loser he was years ago. Henry flees the school to the sound of cruel taunts. The one sympathetic voice among them, Elsa.

After Henry takes a job as an undertaker’s assistant, Henry offers to stay late one night, taking the opportunity to marvel at the dead bodies and their various parts. Frank then goes to confront Henry about his apparent close friendship with Elsa. But a series of mishaps results in Henry inadvertently inflicting multiple, severe injuries to every part of Frank’s body.

Instead of taking Frank to hospital, Henry drags him back home, locks him in the basement, and plans to make a friend. Quite literally.

While Elsa searches for her missing fiancé, and Fraser is convinced Henry is behind the disappearance, Henry begins stealing body parts from work necessary for Frank’s transformation. As Henry toils away, Frank pleads with his maker to release him so that he can be reunited with Elsa.

But when Frank realises he can be remade stronger, taller, and in such a way as to fix his receding hairline, he slowly becomes convinced that Henry is onto something. Henry finally makes a friend.

While Fraser’s search for Frank and his harassment of Henry intensifies, Elsa learns of Frank’s infidelity and turns to Henry for an unlikely source of comfort and in time, the two begin to acknowledge their unrequited love for each other.

But, nearing completion, and suspecting Henry of once again having eyes for Elsa, Frank escapes Henry’s basement and terrorises the small town, venturing out into the night, in search of his lost love. Henry must now rescue Elsa from the monster he created, as well as the monster he himself has become.