Well, this was apparently the weekend for, if not great horror movies, than at least ones with interesting premises. Out of Darkness started off pretty well, but I felt that it somewhat fell apart in the end. But then there’s Lisa Frankenstein, setting itself up as, if nothing else, a dark comedy from screenwriter Diablo Cody. Cody’s previous entry to the horror genre, Jennifer Body’s, has come under a bit of critical re-evaluation in recent years. Granted, I haven’t seen it, but I do know there seems to be the idea the movie held up better than its initial reception.
Anyway, if nothing else, Lisa Frankenstein still has that interesting premise of crossing the Frankenstein story with a teenage romance story, set in the 80s.
It’s 1989 in an unnamed American suburb where teenage Lisa Swallows (Katheryn Newton) is a social outcast, but for good reason: her mother was brutally killed by an ax murderer, a man who was never caught, and Lisa was home at the time. As it is, she has her stepsister Taffy (Liza Soberano) there for support, even if the beauty pageant winning cheerleader doesn’t quite get Lisa. Her father (Joe Chrest) seems to be a bit out of it, but her stepmother (a gloriously evil Carla Gugino) is a whole other story, ready to blame Lisa for all kinds of things. Lisa seems to be an outcast as it is, with an unrequited crush on the head of the literary magazine, but she spends all of her time in a long-neglected cemetery.
Then, after a bad experience at a high school party that Taffy insisted Lisa attend, a blast of lightning reanimates the nearly century old corpse under Lisa’s favorite tombstone. The nameless Creature (Cole Sprouse) isn’t quite whole, but it turns out that Lisa, with her sewing skills and a malfunctioning tanning bed, has the ability to graft new parts onto the Creature from fresh corpses, and there are a few people around that Lisa might not mind seeing dead. That said, she’s treating the Creature as a confidante, missing how much he seems to have a crush on her. Can these two crazy kids get away with murder and still somehow find love?
Alright, not a bad premise, and despite the murders, the movie largely plays out like a standard 80s teenage comedy. Lisa could very easily be any number of Molly Ringwald protagonists, with the Creature, mostly unable to speak, as the long-suffering guy who is in love with her and doesn’t seem to know how to tell her. Likewise, the movie does play to Cody’s strengths as a writer, and the general setting looks like Tim Burton designed one of the suburban communities of a John Hughes’s movie. And I will say that one of the Creature’s kills was particularly funny, and there’s some good characterization for Lisa, the Creature, and Taffy.
However, the movie didn’t quite work for me. Maybe this one, like Jennifer Body, will get that critical re-evaluation in a few years, but for all that Newton, Sprouse, Soberano, and especially Gugino give good performances, I can’t say that the movie just quite came together. That one kill aside, I didn’t find the comedy elements all that funny, and the romantic elements felt more cliche. The only real difference is the frustrated young man in this story is a reanimated corpse with, apparently, very foul-smelling tears and a tendency to shed worms and millipedes. There are good and clever ideas in this movie. It’s just that the parts do not add up for what I would call a particularly satisfying whole.
Grade: C
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