1 ½ stars
There’s something off about Lisa Frankenstein. It could be the cotton candy colors of the sets and costumes, the way the “jokes” bounce around and die without getting many laughs, or the cheesy soundtrack that feels more like the promotional department threw it together to sell CDs than match anything happening on the screen. It could be all that or just the overachieving of first-time director Zelda Williams, who is swinging for the fences, mistaking style for substance.
Whatever it is, it doesn’t work.
Randomly set in 1989, Lisa Frankenstein is the story of high school goth girl Lisa (Kathryn Newton) struggling to fit in at a new school and the family that adopted her after an ax-wielding home invader gruesomely killed her mom as Lisa watched from her hiding place in a hall closet. When the struggle gets too much, Lisa retreats to Bachelor Grove, an abandoned cemetery, to do grave rubbings and read sad poetry to the headstone with a Byron-esque bust.
One night during a storm, lightning strikes the statue and brings the corpse under the sod. The reanimated body looks relatively intact, considering he died in 1837, as he stumbles to Lisa’s house in search of his friend.
What follows is a mess, a series of scenes and images that the script, written by Diablo Cody, who won an Original Screenplay Oscar in 2008 for Juno, never connects in any meaningful way. Or it leaves too much up to the viewer’s imagination. For example, Lisa and her zombie friend discover that she can sew body parts from other people onto his, and after a quick trip to the tanning bed, the body parts reanimate, too. The reference to Frankenstein’s monster brought to life in the 1931 James Whale classic Frankenstein is evident to anyone familiar with the Boris Karloff film. Still, there is no indication that anybody in Cody’s script, the 1989 she is recreating of the 2024 audience for Lisa Frankenstein, will make the connection. Or worse, care about it.
Like the 152-year-old soul at Lisa’s side, Lisa Frankenstein stumbles around as more body parts are collected and more time gets spent in the tanning bed. Along the way, the townsfolk finally figure out something is happening and needs to be stopped. Some of it’s fun, some of it’s stupid. Like the rest of the story, none ties together very well.
