I dislike few things more than a well-funded riff on very cheap ‘80s genre flicks. For every Mandy, one gets a dozen or so movies that just miss the point outright — creativity is what made those films special (with a hefty dosage of DIY pragmatism tossed in for good measure) — and it’s even worse when, in an attempt to pay homage to every one of a filmmaker’s pet influences, they muddle and mix up eras. But it’s even weirder when something like Zelda Williams’ Lisa Frankenstein is brought to life: One look at this jaundiced hodgepodge of faux-goth homage and Diablo Cody’s memories of halcyon days of feathered hair and Tiffany tapes, and you have to wonder if the pitchfork-and-torch-wielding mob that chased Boris Karloff out of their German town was on to something.
The issues start early. When one thinks of the name “Frankenstein,” as in “Victor” or “Henry,” they’ll normally draw up images of Colin Clive or Gene Wilder shouting, “It’s alive!” — a mad scientist about to unleash the forces of electricity to ensure that Mary Shelley would, for good reason, remain more famous than her mother or, for that matter, her husband. Our Frankenstein stand-in here (the name gets adopted later on) is Lisa Swallows (Kathryn Newton), a heavily traumatized high school outcast who is A) not a science person at all, and B) lives in the shadows of her more popular stepsister, Taffy (Liza Soberano). See, in a thread the movie establishes, and then totally fucking drops, an axe-wielding masked psycho murdered Lisa’s mom and becomes selectively mute. Sure, she’s crushing on the editor of the school’s lit mag/newspaper and likes monster movies and hanging out at the cemetery, but she’s just been set up for failure in an environment like a 1989 high school and is almost formless. But, importantly, Taffy is kind to her, in the way that she can be: Things aren’t all terrible, even if her step-mom (Carla Gugino) is a bitch and her dad is basically in the same mental state she’s in.
When Taffy takes her to a party, Lisa winds up with a tainted solo cup intended for a true-blue goth girl; she winds up getting sexually harassed by some evil nerd and, in a drugged-out daze, makes her way to the cemetery. It’s there that some magical force decides to bring back the inhabitant of the one grave she likes — the one that sports a bust of a brooding young man — and the next night, Liza has to fend off a muddy home invader before realizing that it’s the shockingly-well-preserved corpse of her non-corporal crush. Played by Cole Sprouse, he’s our creature: A mute Victorian sad boi whose only mission in life is to have Lisa return his magical affections for her. We find out relatively little about him, aside from an introductory animated title sequence that walks us through the basics, and he is essentially a wish-fulfillment machine. He’s Christian Slater in Heathers, stripped of personality and purpose, and he becomes her pet project. She discovers that thanks to a broken tanning machine hidden in her backyard, she can reassemble his missing parts — a hand, ears, etc. — provided she has a steady supply of freshly acquired body parts, requiring that they build up a body count. The first murder is an accident. The rest are… less so. At least the handsy guy gets his deserved comeuppance.
As far as Williams is concerned, she does a solid job with a production of this size: The sets are well-designed evocations of Burtonesque suburbia (though I’d file much of this movie’s style away in the “Tonight Tonight” sub-genre of goth evocation), and she has a real knack for the rhythm of slapstick physical comedy. Sprouse is the movie’s greatest asset, as he’s committed fully to the bit, and Williams relishes in his goofy performance as he lumbers about acting like a stiff moron (with echoes of Bill Fagerbakke in Under Wraps – only ‘90s kids will get this, etc. — here). He doesn’t have a tongue, so he’s perfectly silent for much of the film, grunting his way through scenes, using his arched frown to be vaguely Keaton-esque. His performance is really solid, but he’s been gifted an asset by Cody that none of the other performers have: he doesn’t have to spout her dialogue out. Newton is burdened with speaking for both of them in an often hyperactive fashion, and what she says is revealing, to say the very least.
So, what we have here is Weird Science without the nerds having to make anything (I imagine if Anthony Michael Hall were murdering women to put together an ideal girlfriend, without the ironic comeuppance of Frank Henenlotter’s Frankenhooker to help smooth things over, it’d go over a little less well), Heathers without the emotional justification for its protagonists lashing out at those keeping them down or interpersonal conflict between the couple, and Edward Scissorhands without the gentle kindness of Burton’s steady hand. In short, Cody’s script is a fucking mess. For every decent riff or gag, eight different classically Cody lines are outright buried by Williams’ inability to find a cadence in the dialogue. Say what you will about Juno, but at least Jason Reitman understood that the clip of the wordplay was part of the point — Cody’s forgotten how to emphasize her best lines, and her characters suffer as a result. Lisa, in particular, is so thinly drawn that her manifestation of Cool Goth Energy, enforced upon her by the Creature (who, while hiding in a closet, finds her best Lydia Deetz gear and demands she wear it), as well as her hyper-aggressive nature comes less as liberation and more as expression of dormant dark Dark Triad traits. Narcissistic injuries, exploitation of friends and family, manipulation, and personality-shifting (she just steals that OG goth’s style when she realizes her Byronic crush is attracted to it) – you name it, it’s on the menu, with a silent manservant ready to actualize those desires.
She’s horrible, and the film refuses to engage with it in any way, shape, or form. Consequences vaguely exist for her, but what she gains is vastly larger than what she goes through during the film, vanquishing her enemies, building her dream man (who only earns her affection after literally being able to fuck her with someone else’s dick), and evading any sort of punishment. At the same time, she inflicts all sorts of pain on the very few people trying to be nice to her (who are coded as jerks not because of their behavior but because of the different social strata that they belong to), and the movie is not as mean to her as it should be to earn this level of fantastical sociopathy and for the viewer to delight in it. Her mom’s death causes her to traumatize everyone around her, and the movie simply sees it as an empowerment that she’s entitled to. Think of it as the modern ethical parallel to all of the scumbag protagonists of Teen Movies from the ‘80s, with unearned cruelty (perhaps Cody’s way of trying to make the work more “complex”) left unexamined in the same way. If anybody remembers this in 20 years, they’ll write about it in the same way that folks currently do with something like Revenge of the Nerds, where writers pull back the veil and try to educate you about how fucked-up this cultural relic is.
Trust me, I hate sounding like such a fucking scold, but Lisa Frankenstein is so thoughtlessly cruel and so thoroughly Cody that it breeds a special kind of frustration. Cody’s a pop-culture omnivore – she tears through references to ‘80s media left and right, and undoubtedly has a long list of films she’d cite as an influence here – but her worldview is wholly incompatible with the genre she’s writing in. When she wrote a more traditional horror film (one set in a contemporary time, even), she was able to find some way around a lot of these issues, perhaps by extending a fair amount of empathy to the central characters in Jennifer’s Body, even if she was still bathing it in a certain degree of ’09-era promise ring bullshit. She’s able to write contemptible yet empathetic characters – Young Adult being her strongest script – yet for whatever reason, she isn’t able to take a high-level perspective of her protagonist’s actions, rendering the entire thing as just a form of pseudo-sociopathic fantasy with only the most meager justifications for some of Lisa’s worst actions in this story. Where it ultimately ends up thematically is in Juno land, where the worst thing one can be is a teenage girl having sex out of wedlock. Even that character had to grow and change throughout the film to achieve her happy ending.
All she had to do was just fully embrace the nihilism at its core and make the world of Lisa Frankenstein as vapid and cruel as its protagonist, with her “twue love” being at least a vague expression of pure sentiment in a fundamentally broken place – the least bad option out of a terrible bunch. But, instead, we’re stuck with trickle-down trauma, proverbially fucking off to Santa Barbara away from the rotting interior. And to be fair, you can’t get more ’80s than that.