*½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Kathryn Newton, Cole Sprouse, Liza Soberano, Carla Gugino
written by Diablo Cody
directed by Zelda Williams
by Bill Chambers During what I suppose constitutes the climax of Zelda Williams’s Lisa Frankenstein, the “UK Surf” remix of The Pixies‘ “Wave of Mutilation” cues up on the soundtrack. It’s broadly fitting–three people have been mutilated over the course of the picture, and our antiheroine is preparing to claim a fourth victim with an axe–and period-appropriate. (“Wave of Mutilation” came out in 1989, the year in which the movie takes place.) It’s also, like a lot of the creative decisions driving Lisa Frankenstein, amateurish in its literal-mindedness, derivativeness (anyone who knows anything will tell you that “Wave of Mutilation” (UK Surf remix) belongs to Pump Up the Volume), and clunkiness, with the song fighting a losing battle to be heard through the prophylactic of Isabella Summers’s score. Lisa Frankenstein is the brainchild of writer-producer Diablo Cody, her first horror comedy since Jennifer’s Body, a film I didn’t care for in 2008 but suspect I was wrong about, having watched it back then as some sort of Megan Fox litmus test instead of as its own thing. I’m prepared to accept that I’m similarly wrong about Lisa Frankenstein–that I’m too old and male for it, that it will endear itself to me over time, the way today’s trash turns into tomorrow’s treasure. I dunno, though. I don’t think demographics are the issue–Cody conceived it as a distaff Weird Science (hence “Lisa”), and that’s kind of my wheelhouse–and I don’t think Lisa Frankenstein is epochal enough to age like anything other than milk.
Start with wallflower Lisa Swallows (Kathryn Netwon), who dresses like Stevie Nicks’s little sister and prefers the company of the dead, spending her free time at the cemetery doing headstone etchings and reading to her favourite corpse, whose ostentatious monument trumpets him as an unmarried, Byronic beauty. A recent transplant to the town of Bachelors Grove, Lisa’s a misfit in school and at home, where she struggles to get along with her new family: wicked stepmother Janet (Carla Gugino), a Roald Dahl grotesque who wants to have Lisa committed, and stepsister Taffy (Liza Soberano), a bubbly cheerleader who tries, mostly ineffectually, to be an ally to Lisa. Dragging Lisa to a party as the movie begins, Taffy first wants to give her a speedy makeover and talks her into using her personal tanning bed, which promptly electrocutes Lisa. Later, at the party, Lisa imbibes a spiked drink, and the twerpy little incel who rushes to her rescue (Bryce Romero) has disgusting ulterior motives. She flees to the cemetery and makes a wish that she could be with her crush from beyond the grave, and then it’s only a matter of time before the mute “Creature” (Cole Sprause) crawls out of the ground and shambles up to her doorstep, stinking of rotting flesh and missing a few pieces. Lisa’s immediate buyer’s remorse causes the Creature to leak green tears, but she takes pity on him; a dress-up montage ensues. Then they discover that taking revenge on those who’ve wronged Lisa is a great way to harvest some fresh appendages for the Creature–and to fall in love.
Lisa Frankenstein is a pastiche anchored to the deadweight of ’80s nostalgia, monster romance, and, of course, Frankenstein, a strangely moribund conceit despite its perpetual relevance. (When Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein failed to recapture Bram Stoker’s Dracula‘s box-office glory, a friend remarked, “Dracula’s a rock star and goths are basically groupies. You never hear about Frankenstein groupies.”) Without question, there’s an uncanny quality to the form of the film–retro aesthetics abound, from the pastel palette to the lighting and lens choices–that can make Lisa Frankenstein feel as much like a period artifact as it does a period piece, and one might generously include its lacklustre plotting in that. Weird Science, after all, sees its geek heroes manifesting the perfect woman with their home computer in scene two, without much in the way of logic, preamble, or conflict. On the other hand, Weird Science was working in a popular cinematic idiom that conflated computers with sorcery. (Think Tron or Electric Dreams.) There was a built-in suspension of disbelief there. An impromptu wish on a tombstone resurrecting Sprouse’s Victorian pianist wouldn’t pass muster in a Jason movie, so I can only feel trolled for caring enough to know better.
According to interviews with Cody, Lisa Frankenstein takes place in the Jennifer’s Body-verse, suggesting that because you’ve already accepted teenage succubi, you should have no objection to Lisa and the Creature’s supernatural kismet. As adept a quipster as Cody remains, there’s something depressing about her being back here after making artistic if not commercial strides with the screenplays for Young Adult, Tully, and Ricki and the Flash, à la Kevin Smith donning the Silent Bob getup.1 At least Smith is pandering to a loyal, homesick fanbase. There is an audience that regards Cody as a generational voice, but I doubt they grew up with her in the sense that they regard her as a YA author who got sidetracked. Even when she did write for teenagers, she wrote them as Gen-X hipsters in millennial bodies. Now she’s vaguely insulting them with a screenplay that has the crude dramaturgy of a bedtime story, not to mention the usual temporal dislocation that narcissistically denies kids a time capsule of their own era.2 What to make of the scene where Taffy tells her friends that an axe murderer killed Lisa’s real mother while Lisa cowered in the closet, complete with flashback? I get the comic dissonance of having Taffy chirpily recount this traumatic backstory, but the axe murder, the tableau of a once-winsome Lisa playing Parcheesi with her mom, the little detail, which doesn’t come up again, that the killer was never caught–the particulars are so overwhelmingly arch that only a certain disdain for the assignment comes through.
The insistent echoes of iconic works throughout Lisa Frankenstein don’t exactly contradict the impression that Cody’s taking a piss, though they’re perhaps thematically defensible–a Frankenstein movie that is itself Frankensteined from other movies. One for the postmodernists, I guess. And they may betray a neophyte director leaning on crutches in bringing a fantastical, bygone world to life. From the Edward Gorey twice-removed stylings of the opening credits and dream sequences to the juxtaposition of goth and Avon Lady aesthetics (i.e., Victoriana and suburbia), Lisa Frankenstein is an ersatz Tim Burton film, complete with paper-doll versions of Winona Ryder and Johnny Depp in Newton and Sprouse. (Edgar Bug from Men in Black shows up in the latter’s performance, too, as the Creature ejects worms from his orifices and adapts to his new old skin suit.) Williams, like her late father Robin Williams, is a fine and esoteric mimic, but she trades his rapid-fire energy for a pace best described as bovine, and the tone gets away from her the more the Creature and Lisa take on the mantle of another Winona Ryder power couple, Heathers‘ J.D. and Veronica. Blame the PG-13 mandate: Taming the violent consequences of their killing spree, the film’s cockeyed romanticism acquires a kind of toxic earnestness that transforms Lisa Frankenstein into a commercial for teenage sociopathy. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the Creature is wearing Mork suspenders in the epilogue, which is…weird, right? But at least it’s a genuine idiosyncrasy in a movie filled with secondhand idiosyncrasies.
THE BLU-RAY DISC
Universal shepherds Lisa Frankenstein to Blu-ray in a 1.85:1, 1080p transfer. (A 4K release has yet to be announced.) While I can’t find any confirmation of how the picture was shot, this is a lovely reproduction of a very filmlike source; the movie defies trend with a colourful, at times Bava-esque palette that really pops in this incarnation. Subtle focal distortions at the edges of the frame create vignettes within which the image is crisp and tactile, rewarding freeze frames of the mossy cemetery and the carpeting at the Swallows’. Contrast is deep but supple and pushes the envelope for the capabilities of SDR, though other reviewers have called out what they perceive as black crush. I personally can’t fault the presentation–or, for that matter, Paula Huidobro’s cinematography. (She shot the first two seasons of “Barry” and was instrumental in developing its signature stylishness.) The attendant 5.1 DTS-HD MA track gives good thunder and lightning and is more than serviceable in reproducing the onslaught of New Wave hits, even if the mix doesn’t always let them breathe. Voices are clear as sparkling water.
Also on board is a feature-length yakker from Williams that begins with her crediting Catch Me If You Can as the inspiration for animating the opening titles and shadowbox art for the actual look of them. We learn about various concessions to the PG-13 rating–so long, Janet’s sexuality–as well as smaller compromises that were made during production, like the montage of classic monster movies that had to be dropped when they couldn’t clear the clips, or the interior decoration of Taffy’s car. “Literally my least favourite thing to do is anything in a car,” Williams says. One senses that recording audio commentaries is number two on that list. She touches on how a key death was changed from a stabbing to electricity so as to avoid the hot potato of suicide, but doesn’t Lisa ultimately sacrifice herself?
Video-based extras on this typically skimpy Collector’s Edition from Universal launch with a 4-minute block of “Deleted Scenes” (five in total). Although there’s not a lot to see here (indeed, these are mostly scene extensions that go unmissed), one of the elisions (“Incredible Friend”) does provide insight into how Lisa and the Creature are disposing of the bodies while adding shading to their burgeoning romance. A 2-minute “Gag Reel”–haven’t seen one of those in a while!–is noteworthy not for all the clowning around, but for containing an outtake of an amputation too graphic to include in the movie proper. “An Electric Connection” (5 mins.) finds Cody considering Lisa as another of her young women protagonists “coming into their power and perhaps being corrupted by it.” She confesses to living vicariously through her characters, which rather stickily brings us back to the idea that in Lisa Frankenstein, depiction does equal endorsement. Otherwise, this is actors discussing their roles. Cast and crew return for “Resurrecting the 80s” (5 mins.), in which the various departments involved in the movie’s exacting albeit heightened recreation of the eponymous decade are justly celebrated. Rounding out the featurettes, “A Dark Comedy Duo” (4 mins.) refers to Newton and Sprouse/Lisa and the Creature, whose chemistry and hilarity are a tad overstated by the interviewees. U.S. copies of the Blu-ray are bundled with a digital code.
101 minutes; PG-13; 1.85:1 (1080p/MPEG-4); English 5.1 DTS-HD MA, English DVS 2.0, French DTS 5.1; English SDH, French, Spanish subtitles; BD-50; Region-free; Universal
1 That said, I think about the curiously morbid Clerks III a lot. A lot.
2 Does it ever occur to Gen-X writers that the reason they fetishize ’80s movies is because they can actually see the decade they grew up in all these years later?
