Dead On Arrival

As with any black comedy with a body count, it’s all about the execution. Lisa Frankenstein starts with a cute title and a fun premise—mousy girl brings Victorian-era corpse back to life—but rigor mortis sets in quickly with this stiff riff on Tim Burton-inflected rom-com satires.

There’s a lifelessness to the on-screen antics that a visual stylist like Burton would have never allowed, and a lack of rhythm between the teen protagonists that would have been anathema in other decade-defining pitch-black touchstones like Heathers. This fizzled Frankenstein is a flatlined ’80s cinematic carbon copy, throwing out era-specific pop chum—a Walkman here, an REO Speedwagon power ballad there, all sprayed with a healthy dose of White Rain aerosol—with increasing desperation. The flop-sweat antics occasionally throw off sparks of life, but that elusive pulse is less a product of inspiration than it is the proverbial dead cat bounce.

LISA FRANKENSTEIN ★★ (2/5 stars)
Directed by: Zelda Williams
Written by: Diablo Cody
Starring: Kathryn Newton, Cole Sprouse, Liza Soberano, Henry Eikenberry, Joe Chrest, Carla Gugino
Running time: 101 mins

Diablo Cody’s script, with its patented snark and broad-stroke gags, traffics in in-your-face femme non-sequiturs like “I gotta go change my pad” and “That’s a douche bag.” Edgy! But it also has a baseline structural integrity along with a darkly funny arc for its prim-wallflower-to-black-swan protagonist Lisa Swallows (Kathryn Newton, doing as much as she can with less-than material). A stronger director could have whipped its messy scene constructions and paper-thin caricatures into frothy fun belying low-key pathos. In the hands of first-time feature filmmaker Zelda Williams, though, the material lacks any sort of urgency or tension, let alone glee, with Lisa’s transformation more laid-back sass-and-flash reactive than it is infused with intent or motivation.

And wither the Creature? Cole Sprouse’s reanimated corpse is a mute monster, a Johnny-Depp knockoff magically drawn to Lisa one night after she staggers through her favorite haunt, Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery, and makes a spiked-punch wish to be with the unmarried man in her fave grave. One fateful lightning strike later, the Creature arrives at her home, mud-covered and vomiting green bile that also oozes from his tear ducts. Good thing Lisa’s popular cheerleader stepsister Taffy (Liza Soberano, genuinely charming) has a tanning bed with the groan-worthy brand name “Kiss of Life Sun Tanner” and a propensity to accidentally shock its occupant into better health. Lisa gives the Creature a makeover—yes, there is a clothing montage—and her TLC eventually leads to PDA.

What’s odd is that the Creature is not her amorous obsession until the very end, in what feels like a screenwriter’s sort-of arranged coupling. He’s merely a “good listener” while Lisa does all the talking. For most of the film, Lisa obsesses over Michael Trent (Henry Eikenberry), the hunky editor of the school’s lit magazine. He praises her “really strong poems,” she ogles in hapless delight. Does their rapport develop at all? No. Do we get to hear some of those really strong poems? No. Do we even know anything about the Creature’s former life, aside from his bachelor status and proclivity for playing the piano? No. So much for character development.

What we do get is a bizarre backstory about how a deranged killer axed Lisa’s mom to death, and how Lisa’s father Dale (Joe Chrest, instantly forgettable) quickly remarried an uptight nurse named Janet (Carla Gugino) who keeps questioning Lisa’s mental health and wants to put her in a psycho ward. “Damn it, Janet!” Says Lisa in a throwaway Diablo Cody bit of Rocky Horror throwback flotsam that no Gen Z viewer will get. And what follows is a slew of unexpected murders that allow Lisa to gather a few key body parts for the Creature and sew them back on with increasing delight.

The last severed piece is actually a pretty funny sight gag that the Creature thrusts upon Lisa in more ways than one, and feeds into a sequence that loops back to a repeated Méliès reference supposedly related to Lisa’s Goth-inflected affection for silent film. Do we see her ever watching a silent film? No. Are Goths known for loving silent films? No. Again, just like Lisa’s Madonna-meets-Stevie-Nicks-meets-Robert-Smith love for all thinks black, lacy, and eyeliner-related—and just like this disappointingly empty movie—it’s purely cosmetic.