Focus Features. 2024. Horror comedy. 101 min.
Grade: 2 out of 4
It’s been a frightfully fruitful eight or so months for Frankenstein’s monster, as the thematically malleable creation of Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s classic 1818 novel has been given some clever feminine twists. In 2023’s Poor Things, the furious jumping of Emma Stone’s Bella became a comment on one women’s unshackling from the parental, societal, and sexual domination of men, while Laura Moss’ Sundance head-turner Birth/Rebirth gave the material a horrifying motherly spin. Instead of creating her own millennial riff, Zelda Williams’ derivative—if playful—feature directing debut Lisa Frankenstein is a messy, campy sub-John Hughes zombie comedy about a woman who achieves her best self by finding the proverbial man who’ll just shut up and listen. If that man happens to be a dead 19th century pianist brought back to life by a bolt of lightning, so be it. Sardonic screenwriter Diablo Cody would seem a fine fit for a screwball tale of feminine liberation that unfolds during the sartorially questionable, musically memorable late-1980s. But Lisa Frankenstein is more proof that the ‘80s are becoming a tired comedic hook which here reduces Cody’s script to a campy collection of Gen X pop culture signifiers in search of a larger idea. Its timidity in humor and character places it below Cody’s script for Jennifer’s Body which was often hilarious but similarly pointless. Lisa Frankenstein‘s currency is the currency of other movies, which Williams sloppily stitches together while neglecting to include a beating heart. The result in a comedy so tethered to its overused inspirations that, at times, it feels like Williams’ goal was to approximate the result had Tim Burton directed Heathers. Or Warm Bodies. Or Mean Girls. Or Weird Science.
To be fair, the 1985 comedy Weird Science was, according to Lisa Frankenstein’s press notes, the film’s primary inspiration. The story of two teenage horndogs (Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan Mitchell-Smith) who use a computer to create their dream girl (Kelly LeBrock) Weird Science is as high concept but low achieving as Lisa Frankenstein, except that film was written and directed by John Hughes, so its laughs (while juvenile by Hughes’ standards) were mixed with some semblance of human feeling. Lisa Frankenstein skates along on the pleasures of Mark Worthington’s pastel production designs and Meagan McLaughlin Luster’s period-appropriate costumes while we eagerly wait for a reason to care about the tragegy-fueled journey of its main character or, lacking that, for Cody to take aim at her next target. Her more pointed slings and arrows come at a scattershot pace and, when they arrive, feel like a TV-14 episode of Riverdale, the CW show that gave us Cole Sprouse, whose portrayal of the Creature proves that conveying the inner yearnings of voiceless characters peaked with Charlie Chaplin.
Top-billed Kathryn Newton (Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania) plays 17-year-old Lisa, still grieving the murder of her mother by an axe-wielding maniac. Withdrawn and “needing socialization,” Lisa’s stepsister Taffy (Liza Soberano) coaxes her into attending a local house party. After downing a drink spiked with PCP, she stumbles towards Bachelor’s Grove cemetery where she’s been spending many a forlorn hour by a grave whose tombstone reads, “unmarried man.” After a lightning strike reanimates the grave’s corpse, he and Lisa forge a relationship based on her need to escape her outsider status and his need for replacement body parts. Selling Cody’s distinctive dialogue is not for everyone, but Newton finds nuggets of tentative, angsty humanity in the comedic bon mots while energetically carrying the movie. She also provides its high point, singing REO Speedwagon’s cheesy 1984 ballad “Can’t Fight This Feeling” in a tuneless warble consistent with someone who doesn’t give a damn how bad they sound because they’re in love. That she’s besotted with a reawakened dead man whose green tears give off a disgusting stench is beside the point; the reanimated Victorian-era hottie reanimates Lisa’s sense of self, giving her the confidence to dress halfway to Cyndi Lauper and, in line with all teen desires, not die a virgin.
Like most modern comedies set in the ‘80s (will another decade ever supplant the ‘80s as the most ripe for satire?), Lisa Frankenstein attempts to mine laughs by the mere mention of The Cure and glimpses of Lisa’s evil, psych ward stepmother (Carla Gugino) doing housework in a full aerobics outfit. These Reagan-era touchstones do much of the heavy lifting, and there are moments when you wonder how effective the film would be had it taken place in the present day and relied solely on character investment and Cody’s tasty dialogue to succeed. Then Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds perfume (released two years after this film takes place) enters the chat and you’re grateful there’s something to hang the comedy on.
As a screenwriter, Cody has made us fall in love with her characters before, like Juno and Tully, and she’s also melded comedy and horror before, like in Jennifer’s Body. It’s odd her work here is all surface pizzazz with no depth of character. But she can still surprise us. Lisa initially crushes on Michael (Henry Eikenberry) a dreamy intellectual who quotes Oscar Wilde and wears Friedrich Nietzsche t-shirts, neither of which are played for laughs. Also Cody crafts Taffy as a caring and supportive, and not at all evil, stepsister, although she’s still given to the occasional ditzy comment and laments that her main flaw is that her “hair can’t hold a crimp.” Despite such crisp dialogue, Cody’s normally vicious sense of humor feels so constrained here that when the Creature uses Lisa’s vibrator to massage her back and then later takes an axe to another poor victim to the tune of Jeffrey Osborne’s “On the Wings of Love,” it only reminds us of what’s missing.
Otherwise, name-checking Méliès’ Trip to the Moon and The Creature from the Black Lagoon feels like the recycled dark whimsy of Tim Burton. And instead of serving as cheeky window dressing as Lisa and the Creature, literally and figuratively, help each other become whole again, the window dressing seems to be overarching point. All this shouldn’t bode critically ill of Williams, the daughter of the late comic Robin Williams. She shows plenty of confidence; now she needs the confidence to create something truly original and not a sloppily paced, stitched together combination of disparate genres and worn-out ’80s references that’s neither as transgressive nor as rad as it thinks it is.