Lisa Frankenstein Movie Cast, Crew & Review
Lonely goth girl Lisa (Kathryn Newton) spends a lot of time in her local cemetery. One day, a lightning storm brings her favorite grave-dweller back to life. Now he needs a few missing body parts, which she gathers by murdering her peers.
Diablo Cody mixes the teen monster zeal of her Jennifer’s Body with dark high school serial killer comedy, a revisionist take on Shelley and some nerds-build-a-girlfriend tropes from Hughes and Burton. It’s a messy mix that never quite gels.
Cast
Featuring a ghoulish title character and a reanimated corpse in a tanning bed, Lisa Frankenstein tries to juggle Mary Shelley’s literary classic with a whole host of horror and teen-comedy influences. But the movie flatlines early on and never picks up a rhythm. It’s not difficult to see what director Zelda Williams and screenwriter Diablo Cody were going for — a pitch-black satire that skewers high school snobbery and the oft-lamented sterility of suburban America.
Cody’s script may be rooted in Gen-X nostalgia, but it also carries flourishes inspired by filmmakers from Georges Melies to Tim Burton. And though Liza Soberano might look like a sneering teen queen in her nerdy lab outfit, she delivers the lines with an authentically sassy charm. It’s a testament to her talent that she can take the mopey Lisa from bookworm to bloodhound and still be completely persuasive.
But despite a handful of arrestingly stylized sequences, including an animated shadow play that synopsizes the Creature’s backstory and a dream sequence influenced by German expressionism and MTV, everything else in Lisa Frankenstein falls short. The movie misses a golden opportunity to craft a new cult film for this generation’s mall-Goths and Wednesday Addams wannabes, instead trailing in the footsteps of Heathers and Edward Scissorhands. The only saving grace is Soberano, whose likable performance gives the movie some heart.
Director
A little bit of Daniel Waters, John Hughes, Mel Brooks and Tim Burton goes a long way in this feature directorial debut from Zelda Williams (Jennifer’s Body). Her characters are rooted in the same nerdy-geek, dark-girl zeitgeist of high school serial killer movies, but with added ghoulish flair and references. In fact, the movie is so chock full of easter eggs that it’s impossible to keep up.
But while Lisa Frankenstein has a cool visual style and a charming performance from Kathryn Newton, its high-concept story is squandered beneath layers of homage. The movie’s pacing feels purposefully off, puncturing jokes and sucking the oxygen out of scenes. The tonal shifts are dizzying, and the plot fumbles with a complex emotional through-line about grief and loss.
The most glaring flaw is the lack of a soulful center. While the movie aims to be the new It-girl for weird teens, it never fully embraces its own indie roots and ends up with an unsatisfying mix of horror, comedy and coming-of-age drama. It also fails to capture the sexy and strange magic of Mary Shelley’s classic text. Instead, the gomovies film settles for a snarky pose of look-how-cool-I-am bravado that’s more akin to Heathers than Edward Scissorhands. Even the smitten corpse played by Cole Sprouse from Riverdale doesn’t have enough personality or charm to carry the movie on its own.
Screenplay
A high-concept teen flick about a goth girl and her reanimated monster could’ve been a cult classic, but in the end Lisa Frankenstein fails to deliver on its promise. This debut feature from director Zelda Williams (Young Adult, Jennifer’s Body) and screenwriter Diablo Cody smacks of “Heathers” and Tim Burton movies, but with a more modern sensibility. The film’s spirited young cast and throwback 1980s tunes inject some much-needed life into the shenanigans, but the movie ultimately comes up short on delivering on its premise.
The movie’s biggest asset is the chemistry between its two leads, Kathryn Newton and Cole Sprouse. Both give strong performances as the ill-fated duo, with Newton’s shy antiheroine and the dapper corpse rekindling their friendship under the most trying of circumstances. Sprouse, a natural as the nutty-but-good creature, has an absolute blast playing the part, communicating mostly through grunts and gestures that make him all the more charming.
But the film can’t keep its head above water, thanks to a plodding pace and a scattershot script that mistakes inane wordplay for cleverness and snark for wit. And even with a talented young cast, the movie never fully delivers on its promise of a macabre love story. Mason Novick and Cody produce, and the pic co-stars Carla Gugino, Liza Soberano, Joe Chrest, and Henry Eikenberry.
Rating
Lisa’s life is a bit of a mess, juggling awkward family dynamics and the uneasy pursuit of her first true crush (her high school class clown, played by Cole Sprouse). Then a bolt of lightning strikes the grave of the Victorian bachelor pianist she tends, reanimating him as a lovesick zombie. Embroidered with references ranging from Georges Melies to James Whale’s Universal monster movies to 1980s teen rom-coms, director Zelda Williams’s feature debut is a heady mix that’s hard to pin down. But it’s lead actress Kathryn Newton who really sells this genre-bending mash-up. She’s the real deal, a teen with a dark streak that makes it clear she’s not just another dumb blonde.
It doesn’t take long to realize this movie wants to be many things: a pitch-black satire of yesteryear’s cheesy ghoul fashion, a horror-romance hybrid that snickers at ’80s horror conventions, and a heady gothic romance in the spirit of Edward Scissorhands. But it doesn’t know quite how to pull off any of these intentions, and the result is a messy, chaotic affair that’s neither particularly scary nor very funny.
Lisa Frankenstein is rated PG-13 for violence, bloody images, some sexual material and language, a scene of drug use and a teen drinking scene. It’s a shame because there was an interesting high-concept comedy in here somewhere, but it’s buried underneath a lot of homage and muddled period touches.