‘Lisa Frankenstein’ Will Make You Miss Tim Burton. A Lot.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Pity poor Lisa Swallows (Kathryn Newton), and not just for the unfortunate name. Her mother was murdered by an ax-wielding serial killer; Lisa was in the house, hiding in a backroom when it happened. Dad (Joe Chrest) remarried soon after, which meant that Lisa suddenly found herself spending her senior year at a new high school, living in a new house in a new city. Her brand new stepsister, Taffy (Liza Soberano), is a cheerleader, a Miss Hawaiian Tropic pageant winner, and an oracle of awful advice for her socially-awkward sibling. Her brand new “mom,” Janet (Carla Gugino), would put most Disney evil stepmothers to shame. Because this is 1989, Lisa is considered a misfit and a dweeb by her crimp-haired peers, as well as being mocked for the PTSD she experienced after, y’know, witnessing her loving matriarch being slaughtered.
Thank god for the local cemetery, where Lisa can pass her days stenciling the names of the dead and polishing tombstones. There’s one grave in particular that she gravitates toward, belonging to a young man who perished during the Victorian era. The bust that sits atop his final resting place suggests he was one handsome gent indeed. Were that she could be with this bygone heartthrob, who might understand her personal teen angst and agony! In lieu of that, Lisa will simply pine for the school’s dreamy lit-mag editor-in-chief (Henry Eikenberry).
More from Rolling Stone
'Perfect Days' Features the Best Screen Performance in Recent Memory
'The Promised Land' Gives Mads Mikkelsen the Big, Bloody Epic He Deserves
Then a freak lightning storm happens on the same evening that Lisa attends “the first critical rager of the year” and is given a spiked drink. The next day, she encounters a strange, loping figure bursting into her house. After some chasing and screaming and whatnot, Lisa discovers that The Creature (Cole Sprouse) happens to be the reanimated corpse who previously occupied her fave grave. Much like E.T. — if Spielberg’s alien was a former dandy fop who’s actively rotting — the grunting, mewling zombie is hidden in her closet. Makeovers soon give way to maintenance, i.e. replacing some of The Creature’s missing appendages. Conveniently, there is a defective tanning bed in the garage that doubles as an electro-shock mechanism, and a number of people who Lisa sees as potential, ah, “donors.”
It doesn’t take long to see what Lisa Frankenstein is going for: a pitch-black satire with a taste for the ghoulish and an era-appropriate Goth soundtrack, a zom-rom-com that snickers at yesteryear’s cheesy fashions while paying homage to a host of horror and teen comedy influences. (Screenwriter Diablo Cody has said that she envisioned it as an answer to the Eighties’ sexist “build-a-bitch movies” like Weird Science, which also tracks.) And it takes even less time to clock that while you occasionally catch glimpses of those intentions underneath the mess happening onscreen, you won’t exactly be getting the second coming of Heathers or Edward Scissorhands here, either. Director Zelda Williams (daughter of Robin) and Cody definitely nailed the stitched-together-from-spare-parts aspect of the Frankenstein mythos, to be sure. The reanimation of such material is another matter entirely.
But familiarity isn’t the problem here — just because a 1980s-set horror-comedy bursts with 1980s horror and comedy references doesn’t make it a shambles. Nor is it the script, written by the Oscar-winning Cody (Juno, Jennifer’s Body) and overflowing with her trademark whiz-bang snark and slang-juiced dialogue. (“Half the school is going to bonertown and they don’t even know it!”) Don’t blame Kathryn Newton, who keeps trying to amp up the proceedings through sheer manic energy when she’s not doing the too-cool-for-school thing or making goo-goo eyes over her tilted Ray-Bans. Or ex-Disney Channel royalty Cole Sprouse, stuck repeating cartoon-caveman noises and the same stiff reaction shot over and over again. Or Gugino and Soberano, gamely completing the assignment of Do Vapid Caricatures Making Lisa’s Life Hell But Don’t Stop at Over-the-Top.
What’s wrong with Lisa Frankenstein is the way the combination of these things seem to be happening in several different movies at once, all of which are competing and none of which are communicating with each other. It doesn’t help that you’d think the sense of pacing almost purposefully seems designed to puncture jokes and suck the oxygen out of scenes, sometimes before they’re even halfway through. There’s little sense of direction — it’s why Newton’s performance comes off as hyperactive flailing while everything else feels like it’s flatlining, and the reason that you find yourself distracted from the growing number of dead bodies by the sheer amount of dead air happening onscreen. The only time sparks fly are when that restorative tanning bed crackles and sputters.
The crime isn’t that this well-intentioned attempt at crafting a cult film for this generation’s outcasts, mall-Goths, and Wednesday Addams wannabes feels like it’s trailing in Tim Burton’s wake. (Again: Loving certain movies, and channeling that love into your own movies, is not a crime.) It’s that Lisa Frankenstein makes you miss how Burton and filmmakers like him — and Karyn Kusama, and Pedro Almodóvar, and god help us, even Richard Kelly — could do this kind of mix of the macabre and the swoonworthy on the regular while displaying a unique sensibility. By the end of this tattered, tottering tale of love and revenge, our cadaverous Romeo has found a way to live with his hair-by-AquaNet Juliet happily ever after. The movie itself, however, remains strictly D.O.A. from start to finish.
Best of Rolling Stone
