A coming of RAGE love story about a teenager and her crush, who happens to be a corpse. After a set of horrific circumstances bring him back to life, the two embark on a journey to find love, happiness – and a few missing body parts.
The trailer for “Lisa Frankenstein” portrays the movie as a romantic comedy steeped in 1980s nostalgia. While it gets the ’80s characteristics correct—big hair perms and mullets, jean jackets, skin-tight acid-washed jeans, off-the-shoulder shirts, and more—it fails to do the one thing every film requires: tell a good story.
Lisa (Kathryn Newton), a lonely teenage girl who lives with her father Dale (Joe Chrest), her loathsome and narcissistic step-mother Janet (Carla Gugino), and optimistic step-sister Taffy (Liza Soberano), struggles to come to terms with the death of her mother two years earlier after an axe murderer brutally killed her and has trouble communicating with anyone who isn’t her father or Taffy.
Finding comfort in the local cemetery, she spends her days after school at the grave of a young Victorian man (Cole Sprouse) who died in 1837 and wishes she could be with him. After a thunderstorm rolls through town, a bolt of lightning strikes the dead man’s grave (he is listed as the Creature) and brings him back to life as a lovesick zombie. Lisa has found the man of her dreams, now she just needs to kill those who have made her life miserable, starting with her step-mother, Janet.
The problem with “Lisa Frankenstein,” is that it doesn’t know what type of movie it wants to be. It’s set in the 1980s, but when the Creature comes back to life, we are under the impression that he and Lisa will somehow figure out how to make their situation work in the style of “Warm Bodies.” But then it switches gears, and Lisa and the Creature start ruthlessly killing people without warning, and suddenly, we are in “Heathers” territory, but without the justification the vile characters in that film deserved.
The film so badly wants to be a John Hughes comedy with dark overtones but is totally incapable of balancing each attribute. For the most part, the actors do fine in their respective roles, but Diablo Cody’s script is chaotic and haphazard. Had she stuck with either a comedy or black comedy, it might’ve worked, but as it stands, Cody is powerless to successfully combine the two.
Check out Jonathan Levine’s “Warm Bodies,” starring Nicholas Hoult and Teresa Palmer, for a much better time. It tells the story of a human girl who falls in love with a zombie during a zombie apocalypse and successfully fuses an assortment of genres; the one crucial element, “Lisa Frankenstein,” just can’t get right.
Now available on Blu-ray™ and DVD
