Lisa Frankenstein
A horror-comedy unable to breathe life into its own premise.
While watching Lisa Frankenstein, I had cause to reflect on how desecrations of the laws of God and man ain’t what they used to be. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published at the tail end of the Age of Enlightenment in 1818, is animated by the author’s mingled fascination and horror regarding the ever-expanding horizons of scientific advancement. It is heavy on philosophical inquiries: In our ceaseless pursuit of fresh frontiers of knowledge, are we allowing the spiritual certainties of the past to dwindle into the distance at our backs? What moral responsibilities attend the extraordinary marvels that mankind develops? Is it inevitable that (to invoke Shelley’s beloved Milton) the mind will make a hell out of heaven?
Anyway, Lisa Frankenstein is mostly interested in asking what it would be like if Frankenstein’s monster wore a Violent Femmes t-shirt and had to learn what a vibrator is. It would be unfair to take a comedy to task for not having the same philosophical and moral edge as a nineteenth-century novel, but at a certain point you have to ask what you’re getting instead to compensate. Lisa Frankenstein has precious little to offer. Heavy on snark but light on laughs, it’s a horror-comedy that is much less than the sum of its stitched-together parts.
The best part of the film is easily Kathryn Newton, who plays the titular Lisa. After Lisa’s mother dies at the hands of an axe murderer (don’t ask) and her father remarries, Lisa finds herself in a new high school and a new family. Oppressed by unfamiliar social cliques and a wicked stepmother (played with relish by Carla Gugino), Lisa retreats to a nearby cemetery to read the poetry of the Romantics and fantasize about the deceased young man residing under one of the more picturesque headstones. One freak lightning storm later, he’s dripping grave soil and ichor on her bedroom carpet. I can fix him, she thinks: a common enough dating mistake for a teenager to make, though in this case it involves the grafting of body parts that come from unwilling victims.
It’s a decent-enough hook, with Newton filling her role in it perfectly. The film takes place in 1989, the same year that Hot Topic stores began to sprout up around the country, and Newton plays Lisa as the sort of teen who would buy a “You laugh because I’m different, I laugh because you’re all the same” shirt from one of them. The character is only hazily aware of her personal limitations, but Newton’s finely calibrated performance makes it clear that she sees those limitations clearly. She takes Lisa seriously, even (or especially) when playing up Lisa’s cringeworthy adolescent fixations.
But a single performance can only do so much to row against the current of a film that doesn’t take much of anything else seriously. Lisa dabbles in murder and dismemberment, but the PG-13-friendly violence is practically bloodless and ultimately toothless. Director Zelda Williams stages and shoots scenes in ways that fail to accentuate comedic beats, build atmosphere, or comment meaningfully on the action. At times, she seems to be going for something that resembles John Carpenter’s Halloween in contrasting suburban blandness with dark doings, but she succeeds only at evoking the blandness. As for the comedy, she gets no help from a Diablo Cody script that has zingers aplenty but little wit. The characters are written so broadly that the film often has the same air as a Disney Channel sitcom.
A more assured director could have made this material work, maybe. It’s the sort of thing that Tim Burton, at the height of his powers in the ’80s and ’90s, might have knocked out of the park by transmuting the broadness into camp or melodrama and allowing some darkness to linger around the edges of his grotesque weirdos—think of Batman Returns’ Catwoman. Such films went big on stylized, expressionist production design and—more importantly—exhibited genuine affection toward the gargoyles at their center.
It’s not clear what, if anything, Lisa Frankenstein has affection for. Certainly not its characters—Newton is able to muscle her character into interesting territory through sheer force of charisma, but the rest of the cast is stranded in unlikeable, thankless roles. (As the Creature, Cole Sprouse has fun but is given little to do other than channel Vincent D’Onofrio’s rigor mortis’d physicality from Men in Black.) If Williams and Cody see their characters as anything more than raw materials to be cobbled together into a hip amalgamation of well-used tropes, it’s not apparent in the final film. What remains is a horror-comedy with no blood, laughs, or heart. They don’t make Frankensteins like they used to. —Kevin McLenithan
★★☆☆
Lisa Frankenstein is currently in wide theatrical release.