When Diablo Cody followed up the Oscar-winning success of her debut screenplay Juno with Jennifer’s Body, a horror comedy about a high-school succubus decimating her male classmates that was essentially Mean Girls with a literal body count, I confess that I didn’t quite get it the first time around, finding it to be an uneven clash of tones and ideas that never quite pulled together into a cohesive whole. Of course, time has been very kind to that film and even before it went on to become a considerable cult favorite, I considered my initial thoughts towards it to be almost embarrassingly off-the-mark, perhaps due in part to a deceptive ad campaign that promised the usual dopey thrills and yuks without giving any indication of its incisive observations on the sometimes terrifyingly fluid nature of relationships during that time in life. Therefore, with Lisa Frankenstein, Cody’s return to the same thematic milieu as Jennifer’s Body, I went in with both a higher-than-usual degree of anticipation and a greater willingness to see beyond its gaudy outer trappings in order to grasp its deeper ideas. As it turns out, all I got out of it in the end was yet another uneven clash of tones and ideas that never quite pulls together into a cohesive whole. The difference this time is that I am more confident that the problem is more with the film itself than it is with me.
Set in 1989, the film takes place in an anonymous pastel-laced suburb populated by the usual array of teen movie stock characters—jocks, cheerleaders, goths, nerds, clueless parents (both benign and extra-evil) and the like. Seemingly the only things out of place are a nearby abandoned Victorian-era graveyard and Lisa (Kathryn Newton), a teen girl outsider who is deemed a freak by many because her mother was murdered in front of her eyes by a serial killer a couple of years earlier, an event followed almost immediately by her dad (Joe Christ) marrying the outwardly altruistic/inwardly monstrous Janet (Carla Gugino) and moving them in with her and her cheerleader daughter Taffy (Liza Soberano). Now, Lisa spends most of her time hanging out at that cemetery, making marker rubbings and pining over the bust adoring one particular grave. In an effort to help bring her out of her shell, Taffy brings Lisa to a party that goes about as badly as possible—her drink is drugged and she finds herself being groped against her will by a particularly nerdy classmate—before running on home just ahead of a freak lightning storm.
As it turns out, a bolt of lightning ends up hitting that favorite grave, shocking its occupant (Cole Sprouse) back to life and sending him shambling in Lisa’s direction. Although initially put off a bit by the arrival, she finds herself becoming friendly with this new arrival, someone who genuinely seems to see her, even through ostensibly dead eyeballs. This inspires here to bloom into Goth-style glory, attracting the attentions of her flesh-and-blood classmate crush, the editor of the school literary magazine. (Remember, this is a period piece.) However, she still has undeniable feelings for the new creature in her life, one that is made a little easier with the discovery that Taffy’s malfunctioning tanning bed can help revive dead tissue. Of course, the corpse’s deteriorating body is in need of a number of new parts and before long, a number of people become unwitting donors to the increasingly gruesome cause of true, if icky, love.
Although Frankenstein was, of course, the brainchild of a woman, it has only been in the last year or so that female filmmakers have really tackled its mythos in such films as The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster and Birth/Rebirth and there is therefore a lot of potential for someone willing to take on its ideas from a feminine perspective. The trouble here is that Lisa Frankenstein has a zippy title and a potentially interesting premise but fails to do much of anything of interest with it. Cody’s screenplay feels more like the work of someone who just saw Jennifer’s Body and decided to write something along those lines, unfortunately spending more time trying to emulate Cody’s voice than developing their own. (There is even a bit where we get to see a teenaged girl in the middle of a crisis over explaining the presence of a novelty telephone, an odd bit of self-homage to include in a film whose target audience was perhaps in pre-school when Juno first came out.) The story doesn’t really seem to have any particular point or purpose, the juxtaposition between horror and humor feels forced and the whole thing has the feel of a first draft that never got a much-needed rewrite before production began. (The whole thing about the mysterious serial killer is introduced in a way to suggest it will pay off later but is then almost immediately abandoned.) As for the decision to set it in 1989, so little is done with it that the choice for that era seems to have been made to get rid of potential plot complications like cel phones and the Internet—anyone hoping to see Cody taking a look at high school dynamics in the #MeToo era will be left wanting.
A bigger problem is that while Cody characters maybe as quippy as one might expect, most of them are not particularly interesting. Although Lisa starts off as a reasonably engaging character despite—actually because of—her offbeat nature, she becomes progressively less so as the story goes on and her descent into horny madness becomes more tedious than anything else. As for the increasingly rotten apple of her eye, he is little more than a vaguely ambulatory corpse lumbering around and while he may be as cute and sensitive as a long-dead person can be, he doesn’t really do much of anything of interest, certainly not enough to inspire Lisa turn to the dark side, unless you count sitting at the piano to play a poignant-yet-ironic version of REO Speedwagon’s “Can’t Fight This Feeling.” Newton (who more successfully navigated the horror/comedy divide with the sadly underseen Freaky) and Sprouse certainly throw themselves into their parts but ultimately are unable to make much of them in the end. On the other hand, as Taffy, Liza Soberano does have an reasonably unique character to work with—instead of her being portrayed as a snobby bitch who lives to torment her new stepsister as one might expect, she is instead depicted as a genuinely nice person who, unlike her own mother (a one-note harridan that wastes Carla Gugino’s talents), genuinely likes and cares for Lisa—and she nails it so well that I found myself wishing that Cody could have found a way to tell the story from her perspective, in the way that Jennifer’s Body was seen mostly through the eyes of her mousier best pal.
Marking her feature debut as a director, Zelda Williams is clearly trying to thread the needle between the extreme visual stylization of the likes of Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands and the biting dark humor of Heathers and while this combination of elements may have viewers on the edge of their seats in anticipation of a Winona Ryder cameo, it doesn’t do much for the film as a whole. Although the look is occasionally striking, it isn’t able to distract from the inescapable fact that Willams isn’t much of a storyteller yet—the set-up goes on forever, the middle section feels like it is treading narrative water and the ending is so rushed that even those who have stuck with it up till that point may find themselves let down by it. Another problem is that while the film traffics in material that would seem to lend itself to a certain degree of grisly ghoulishness (including the living dead, murder, body parts removed and reattached and—Spoiler Alert—the ever-present possibility of necrophilia), Williams makes sure to never push things in a way that might risk the all-important PG-13 rating, even if the choice ends up rendering most of the film rather toothless.
Like the creature that sets the titular character’s pulse racing (even if it isn’t quite reciprocated), Lisa Frankenstein is an assemblage of random bits and parts but unlike it, it never quite manages to completely stir to life. If your local multiplex was a shopping mall from the late 80s, this film would be that one store that positioned itself as the “edgy” alternative to the others that flattered its customers for being “strange and unusual,” as a wise character once described herself, while selling them the same shit they could get anywhere else. Of course, as I pointed out earlier, I didn’t care for Jennifer’s Body when I first saw it and I am now an enthusiastic proponent of it. Stranger things have happened, I suppose, but I seriously doubt I will be offering up any mea culpas for this particular review anytime in the future.