They’re calling “Lisa Frankenstein” a “coming of RAGE love story” and that’s pretty clever. But the bad news is this 1980s period-piece take on Mary Shelley’s oft-adapted classic suffers from Mixed Genre Syndrome and hops from horror spoof to trauma survivor story to pure camp to high school comedy, never really finding its footing.
Given that in 2023 alone we had three Frankenstein-inspired films, including “The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster,” “Birth/Rebirth” and the wildly inventive “Poor Things” (with Guillermo del Toro’s “Dr. Frankenstein” in the works) the timing isn’t the best and the film seems relatively tame.
This is particularly disappointing given the screenwriter is the Oscar-winning Diablo Cody (“Juno,” “Jennifer’s Body,” “Young Adult”), with the actor-filmmaker Zelda Williams (daughter of Robin Williams) making her feature debut. Cody’s script has a few choice zingers and Williams displays a sure-handed and smooth directorial style and a good sense of timing, but there’s a lot of scenery-chewing on the part of the cast as they try to wring some laughs out of some pretty thin material. (It doesn’t help that a number of characters in this story are flat-out idiots who are less plausible than the most thinly drawn of sitcom characters.)
In the grand tradition of actors who are about 10 years out of high school playing high schoolers, the now 27-year-old Kathryn Newton (“Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania”) plays teenager Lisa, who is still coping with the horrific trauma of her mother being murdered by an intruder. Lisa’s father Dale (Joe Chrest), who is so lacking in parental skills, intelligence and self-awareness that we wonder if he has suffered some sort of blunt trauma injury, is now married to Carla Gugino’s Janet, a horrible, controlling boor who treats Kathryn like early-story Cinderella. Lisa also has a new stepsister, a cheerleader named Taffy (Liza Soberano), who is also quite stupid but at least she’s nice to Lisa.
Lisa spends an alarming amount of time in the local cemetery, hanging out at the gravesite of a long-dead fellow who apparently looked like the hero of 19th century novel. During an electrical storm, the corpse is reanimated — but as played by Cole Sprouse (“Riverdale”) in a non-speaking role, he remains pretty much a stiff throughout the story, as Lisa goes about collecting some missing body parts, including an ear and a hand, from living targets so that she can sew them onto her new zombie friend. If this means mutilating and then murdering a few locals along the way, so be it. Most of the victims are rather awful people, but do they deserve to be murdered? Has Lisa always been an insane psychopath?
“Lisa Frankenstein” has some surface similarities to films such as “Weird Science” and “Edward Scissorhands,” but the gross-out gags involving Zombie Boy are more disgusting than hilarious and the scares are few and far between. Turns out Lisa Frankenstein’s creation might have been more interesting in her imagination than he is as a walking corpse.
