Lisa Frankenstein
Lisa Frankenstein
Lisa Frankenstein: With the exception of this year’s Sundance which premiered the likes of Megan Park’s My Old Ass which you should look forward to, I think 2018 is a fair answer, the year at least three and very different miracle blocks called “The Hate U Give, Eighth Grade and Blockers” appeared. Or perhaps some have wanted to put “Booksmart” from the following year in that list too. One side or the other, let us all agree that it’s been quite some time.
At least on paper, “Lisa Frankenstein” promised a dinstict flavor which will engage the audience and therefore become the next inevitable-it teen film of the 20s‟ in the westren world. To begin with, it is a fascinating cocktail of several genres at once – horror romance/comedy.
And who else than Diablo Cody could come up with such an interesting combination of a teenager girl and an adult woman, not only in terms of ages but issues addressed (see “Juno” and “Young Adult” against the background of humor and insight), but what diabolical delights “Jennifer’s Body” proved to be.
Then there is the first feature film director Zelda Williams (daughter of Robin Williams) who comes from a heritage of comic book stereotypes. And, at last, there is the great Kathryn Newton (from “Blockers”) as the eponymous heroine a lonely gothic girl in 80s turn Madonna costumes who befriends and is infatuated with a creature that just crawled out of the grave and eventually loses her mind in a very humorous way.
With all these terrific assets at stake, ‘Lisa Frankenstein’ ends up being such a letdown in terms of storyline, which is neither comical, or a young adult film, or a whimsical romance jousting for more of pretty much all its disgusting offerings.
Here the responsibility for the failure must be shared equally between the script and the direction, where the first one does not exaggerate the action of pushing the envelope in any direction, and the second one simply catches the story’s naivety in a safe way with flat and lifeless images bereft of any sorcerous elements.
The account centers around a rather peculiar individual, a misfit named Lisa Swallows, who witnessed her mother being brutally murdered by an axe-wielding maniac, only for her father to marry a psychotic Janet (Carla Gugino) after the horrid incident. At the moment, Lisa merely spends her time avoiding Taffy (Liza Soberano), her popular and sweetcheerleader stepsister and daydreams near a cemetery.
This tomb is her favorite with its old-fashioned bust on it and she found wishes that she can be with the dead person it is on. The character obviously suffered in the hands of her school crush and a predatory lab partner and the thoughts she had made the dead come back. Let me just say it, the inanimate object, pardon the expression, misunderstood Lisa and got out of the coffin to honor the wishes made and join her.
You can’t fault anyone who asks for a little more of “Beetlejuice’s” irreverence and distinctiveness in “Lisa Frankenstein,” possibly a catchy upbeat song and over-the-top, deviously playful… or something “Edward Scissorhands”-leveland in terms of tenderness. Although, apparently, taking a young-and-sad-Johnny-Depp approach isn’t a bad idea for Cole Sprouse’s infatuated monstrosity corpse for a few minutes onscreen as we watch him is quite an acquisition for the film.
These collaborations however fall wholly short of their aims and this is due to the fact that the film wants to cross its genres completely. So, there are a simple three Lasha Falaan saucy kills and zero campy jock motivational montages in Lisa ‘Let’s assemble an updated Victorian monster at all costs’ Frankenstein, not even when our Lisavete and her monster are off looking for spare body parts to help our poor Victorian monster.
Wearing the most ridiculously anthical costumes since the wedding singer, a murderous teenager has an adventure that is so unlike any movies that claim to be teen depravity fantasies in the worst sense of the phrase.
Maybe the author deserves some credit as well—Cody’s script which this time aptly pokes fun at Mary Shelley is a rather bold risk in today’s environment which has its heart in the right place for all the outcast kids dreaming to be understood and embraced in their peculiarities. Elsewhere, both she and Williams seem to be on the same page about a particular notion of the 1980s- a hallow period of high school movies, when a film la Lisa Frankenstein would have been apposite.
But along the way, they appear to have set out to replicate the essence of the type of movie they aspire to update for the century. And so this power-ballad of nothingness, titled “Can’t fight this feeling” by REO speed wagon seemed rather out of place in the film “Lisa Frankenstein”. As literature Williams’s debut is conceivably quite unwieldy and somewhat triumphant, at its peak, it feels like the very monster of the piece being described, dead surrounding, but going nowhere. It is a great disappointment.
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- Genre: Comedy, horror, Uncategorized
- Country: United States
- Director: Zelda Williams
- Cast: Kathryn Newton, Liza Soberano, Jenna Davis
