Lisa Frankenstein (15)

Teenager Lisa Swallows lingers in a state of shock after her mother falls victim to an axe murderer. Adding to the girl's misery, her father Dale remarries six months later to cruel, self-obsessed nurse. At her lowest ebb, Lisa visits the local cemetery and voices her desire to join one of the bodies in the ground. A bolt of lightning strikes the grave after she leaves and reanimates a young Victorian man, whose zombified form develops a romantic attachment to Lisa.

LondonNet Film Review

Lisa Frankenstein (15) Film Review from LondonNet

During the 1980s, teenage misfits found their groove in seminal films like The Breakfast Club, The Goonies, Weird Science and Heathers. Diablo Cody, Oscar-winning screenwriter of Juno, nods affectionately to this era of adolescent underdogs in a bloodthirsty horror comedy set in 1989, which marks the feature directorial debut of Zelda Williams, daughter of master improviser Robin Williams. Gorgeous opening credits, stylised as a monochrome shadow puppet show, succinctly recount the untimely demise of a nameless Victorian-era pianist (Cole Sprouse), whose reanimated form – courtesy of a lightning strike – is a pungent and unlikely romantic suitor in Williams’s tonally disjointed picture…

The disorienting mish-mash of genres – slasher, coming-of-age comedy, Gothic horror, romance, ghoulish crime caper – is loosely stitched together, rather like the zombified paramour and his “acquired” fresh body parts. Cody’s script trades in darkly humorously one-liners (“You don’t have to worry about anything because your mum has already been murdered”) and the outlandish bloodletting elicits some of the biggest laughs. Sprouse exercises his physical comedy muscles as the monstrous suitor, who looks strikingly similar to Johnny Depp’s Sweeney Todd when wielding an axe, while co-star Kathryn Newton channels Desperately Seeking Susan-era Madonna for her goth-lite attire. A palpable absence of screen chemistry between the pair leaves the film with one severed foot perpetually in the grave.

Socially awkward teenager Lisa Swallows (Newton) slowly emerges from traumatic mutism after witnessing the death of her mother (Jennifer Pierce Mathus) by the blade of a masked maniac. Six months after this devastating loss, her father Dale (Joe Chrest) marries a cruel, self-obsessed nurse named Janet (Carla Gugino), who already has a perky cheerleader daughter named Taffy (Liza Soberano) from a previous relationship. Consumed by morbid thoughts, Lisa visits her favourite headstone in the local cemetery and whispers her desire to join the dead: “I wish I could be with you”.

That night, a bolt of green lightning strikes the grave and reanimates a Victorian man (Sprouse), whose zombified form develops a deep romantic attachment to Lisa. The shuffling stranger intimates he can be made physically whole again with freshly harvested human body parts and electrical discharges from Taffy’s short-circuiting horizontal tanning bed. Utilising rudimentary sewing skills picked up at her part-time job, Lisa wreaks revenge on her tormentors and stitches their severed appendages onto her grateful undead paramour.

Lisa Frankenstein is supposedly brought to life by a miraculous bolt from the heavens but Williams’s picture feels oddly lifeless for extended periods, hampered by inconsistent pacing and tone. A clear emotional through-line proves elusive between appealingly macabre vignettes including a bedroom scene with an unexpected climax. “I just don’t think anyone should be forgotten,” observes Lisa, referring to the dearly departed. Sadly, the film that takes her name might be.

– Kim Hu