A fun pastiche with spare parts: Lisa Frankenstein (2024)

Diablo Cody has returned with a teenage girl horror film that only somewhat echoes 2009's Jennifer's Body. Lisa Frankenstein doesn't come across quite as on the nose, and considerably lighter than her earlier opus. My suspicion is that much of that is owing to the PG rating of the current film which doesn't quite allow for unbridled body horror and more intense sex scenes. It also, more importantly, hobbles character depth and richness.

That doesn't stop Lisa from being enjoyed just on her own considerable merits. The film knows very much the type of film it is and the types of films it is beholden to and the parts of those films it repurposes to its advantage. 

The principle homage it so vintage Tim Burton beginning with the animated title sequence and on down through the neighborhood Lisa lives in and of course, the cemetery from which the Creature of her heart rises from the dead...and to which a couple of characters are dispatched. But/and there are nods to Better Off Dead, Heathers, George Meiles' A Trip to the Moon, and any number of lesser teen horror films. Lisa, is more than her parts, though, even if the film loses focus and muddles things a bit.

Off the bat, Cody's dialog still crackles and is given more dimension by strong performances by Katrhryn Newton as Lisa and Liza Soberano as her step-sister Taffy. Cole Sprouse as the Creature is a treasure in a non-speaking role that seems to call on all of cinema's undead, golems, and resurrected populations. He's acquits himself well with an array of expressions and grunts (no tongue...take that for everything that can mean) and a physical turn that reflects his adaptation to his undead life through to his coming full circle in the third act. 

Carla Gugino is on hand as Lisa's step-mother, a shrew to end all shrews and the ever reliable Joe Chrest is on hand as Lisa's clueless dad (he may be the best clueless dad - see also Ted Wheeler in Stranger Things). The family dynamic is one of simmering dysfunction that eventually erupts in ways that Cody's script takes to its nightmare logic conclusion.

We start out with Lisa Swallow (I don't know why Cody decided on that name(1), except that Lisa seems to swallow - initially, anyway - the indignities of her life in a new town, new school, and new family, six months after her mother was brutally axed to death) getting ready to go to a rager with Taffy. It's a classic 80s set-up; teasing the hair, spraying the hell out of it, and the teen disaffection all rolled into one. Lisa is withdrawn, loves literature, and doesn't particularly care much about her social milieu. When Taffy presses her on boys Lisa likes, she namechecks Michael Trent, the editor in chief of the school's literary paper. Played by a game Henry Eikenberry, he doesn't have much to do except exude sincerity and look pretty.

Taffy doesn't get it, and suggests Lisa could find a more suitable suitor who might - even though not with a football or basketball body - still be reasonable popular and likely cute. Once at the party, it's pretty obvious that Michael is more than cute and while not overly solicitous of Lisa, supports her work and publishes her poetry. While they're talking, Michael's pal Tamara, a goth girl with a serious attitude played by Joey Harris from Halloween Ends, hands Lisa a drink which she downs and in seconds is tripping balls to the wall.

Michael spits his drink out tells Tamara how uncool that is; "She's going from Pepsi to PCP!" Taffy tries to help Lisa out and leaves her to confront Michael and Tamara and in the meantime, Lisa is "rescued" by future incel Doug (Bryce Romero exuding too much niceness, though I suspect that's the idea) who - once he gets Lisa alone in a bedroom upstairs makes his move, only slightly less awkward than Dustin Hoffman's hand on Anne Bancroft's breast in The Graduate. As Lisa makes her getaway, we hear Doug shouting all the stuff from the rebuffed male playbook which is altogether repellent, pathetic, and given Lisa's state, disturbing. That said, she makes her getaway in a nicely set up and shot dreamworld/magical realist tracking shot as she exits the party and the background slowly shifts with lamps and tables ensconced in tree and shrubbery, until she finds herself in the Bachelor's Cemetery at the base of her favorite dead bachelor's headstone. 

It's there that she wishes she could be with him - not in some romantic fashion, but literally with him and everyone else in the graveyard - later. For now, there's a weird electrical storm, green lightning, and a Lisa who returns home to punch the bathroom mirror before passing out. 

By this point, Cody and Williams have given us a goth girl in training, her perky, supportive step-sister, the requisite "cool girls"/plastics who fall in with her perky step-sibling, the handsome deep hunk, the skeevy "nice guy", and jocks that seem to just exist on the periphery of all this. Where it goes is alternatively predictable in some ways, but charged with ideas that seem to lurk under the surface of a film that feels all surface and that's not a bad thing.

When Lisa wakens to Taffy telling her that her step-mom Janet is calling her to come down about the mirror, the dynamic shifts into a slightly higher gear. Janet passively-aggressively calls Lisa on the carpet and makes accusations that cause Taffy to gently call her mother out, who then pivots to slightly softer tones with implied threat. Dale, Lisa's dad, sits quietly, murmuring responses and when called upon to parent, simply asks Lisa to pay for the mirror. 

Gugino imbues Janet with no small amount of self-righteous cluelessness but we also get the feeling that she very much has it in for her step-daughter. Lisa says she'll take an additional shift at the tailor's where she works to cover it.

At work, Michael comes in and apologizes, Lisa's boss is astonished Lisa has friends and makes a derogatory remark about her breasts, and for a moment things stop, somewhat, as they did with Doug. It took me a minute to decide that Cody intended these moments to act as full stops, calling attention to Lisa's objectification certainly as an aspect of being a young woman in the 1980s, but also underscoring that this still happens and we best stop and regard it, even in seemingly inconsequential teen horror homage. It stands an an integral and true part of the text and acts as a commentary to it. This will happen again, as we'll see.

The film kicks into high gear when Lisa is alone at home, declining to join the family (and being denied any meaningful sustenance after getting off work - a slice of meat pizza that looks only marginally less sentient than the plate of goo in Better Off Dead is offered to Lisa the vegetarian), shortly suffers a home invasion by a figure in eighteenth century garb who looks like he escaped a Pirates of the Caribbean set.

In short order, we discover this is the reanimated corpse of Lisa's graveyard confessions, come alive via that storm and her stated wishes to be with him. For the present, she focuses simply on getting him presentable. Lisa's unflappability would ordinarily be off-putting but as with earlier works in the genre, this is a feature, not a bug. Initially, she's running in terror from him, tosses ceramic knick-knacks at him to defend herself and as she's trying to call 911, discovers he's on the other line on her dad's shoe phone. Trust me, kids, it was a novelty item. From there, she and he begin the bonding.

Lisa begins with getting her new friend a shower and into some new clothes. He returns the favor at one point by throwing some black threads her way which we later learn were hand-me-downs from Taffy. 

The home shattered ceramics and broken glass and debris don’t go unremarked on by Janet. She retorts that Lisa is just acting out, unwilling to move on from her mother’s death, and “you know what happens to children who act out, Lisa? They wind up in the loony bin!” Taffy interjects that maybe her mother shouldn’t use the term because she herself is a nurse in a mental health facility.

Lisa begins sharing her heartache with her pal and when the conversation turns to him, she notices that he’s missing his left ear. Not that that matters, after all, as Taffy says, it’s easier to just accept a boy as he is instead fo trying to fix him. 

As her wardrobe changes, so does her attitude. Lisa becomes more assertive and less fearful, and as Taffy also says, more attractive, but she needs to work on her congeniality. 

While at Lisa’s at school, Janet spends the day at home listening to a self-help tape about how you/she as an empathetic person needs to protect herself against narcissists. It’s pretty spot-on, but nonetheless, pretty funny. The Creature comes downstairs and noodles on the piano which Janet takes as music on the tape. When she answers the door, he leans over a bowl of cottage cheese and peaches and hocks something into it.

Later that evening, Janet accuses Lisa of planting a worm in her food and tells her step-daughter that she’s made plans to have her committed. Her buddy appears from the closet and ends Janet. As in, ends. He clobbers her with a sewing machine and after examining the body, notes something that Lisa acquiesces to, but not until they do something first. After Janet’s body is dumped in the Creature’s vacated grave, Lisa sews Janet’s ear to the Creature’s head. 

By now, Lisa has also discovered the further revivifying effects that the tanning bed that Taffy had won in a Miss Hawaiian Tropic competition have. Each time her undead friend is exposed to the bed’s radiation, he comes out a little less wobbly, a little less monster-ly, and a little more living-humanlike. It’s a nice touch and adds a nod to Zemeckis-style whimsy, another surefire 80s reference should we need one.

It also happens that Janet was supposed to be on her way to a conference, so no one notices that she’s disappeared just yet. Even Taffy avers that it’s kind of nice that her mom’s not around at first. Going on more step farther, Lisa disagrees and says she misses Janet, that she’s such a nurturer, and so on. Taffy is too sweet and/or naive to notice the sarcasm.

The Creature - we never do get his name from the headstone which strikes me as odd since Lisa had made rubbings of so many of them and his was her favorite - and Lisa continue their heart to hearts and she divulges her attraction to Michael, explaining to her new bestie that she doesn't like him that way. She also says she wants to lose her virginity to Michael and asks if our revived friend had lost his before he died. Once he replies - nonverbally, of course - and it's here that I'm unsure if he weeps gently or was it earlier, but when he does, apparently, his tears reek. Newton's gagging is on point and I'm such a mark for this kind of humor.

Anyway, the next day at school, Lisa slips a mash note into a locker, asking her swain to meet her at the park. The swain, however, isn't Michael; it's Doug of the douchebaggery of the night of the rager and the resurrection. Needless to say, he's heeding Lisa's siren call as she lures him into the cemetery which causes him to pause. "It's not Christian", he says. "I know", she replies.

She takes full advantage of his wannabe horn-doggedness and once our Undead Comrade appears in frame, Doug knows the jig is up. He goes down with a hatchet to the back and ere long, our buddy has a new right hand, another go in the tanning bed and he's growing ever closer to the Johnny Depp-of-Old template.

We all pretty much can gather that all this can't last. Taffy calls her mom at the hotel, but is told she never arrived and begins to panic despite Lisa's attempts to soothe her. At school, Lisa is called into the principal's office where she's asked about her relationship to Doug and had she seen him recently. For every denial, there's proof to the opposite and Tamara comes in to shoot her down even more. Lisa acts incensed and challenges why they're taking the word of a girl who is no doubt carrying drugs even as they speak. This creates a commotion and Lisa exits saying next time she'll bring her lawyer. As with many of the others, it's a tight scene. 

There's an episodic nature to the movie where each scene is a self-contained moment that is structured around the beats of the dialog almost more than any action that takes place within it. That said, Williams and her cinematographer Paula Huidobro (CODA, and for me, most excitingly, Bill Hader's Barry) have a kind of start-stop visual lexicon. Again, it feels as though Cody's dialog is the metronome but the set-ups and execution are expert.

As Lisa realizes the walls are closing in, she decides she wants to consummate her rite of passage with Michael ASAP. Janet's car has been sighted and we see Creature Boy attempting to boost it to bring it back which, in passing, results in the braining of an old codger who was belittling a little kid. Sorry, old codger, but calling a little kid a pansy wasn't cool then, either.

Lisa leaves the school, finds CB and they demands they go to Michael's. He doesn't think it's a good idea, but Lisa will not be swayed. She enters his family's house, and we can hear voices in the bedroom. Yep, it's Taffy with Michael! Lisa reads him the riot act and he says he likes her just not that way. Taffy, who early on had been trying to cock block, so to speak, Lisa's infatuation said that she really didn't care for the attention of the jocks - they only want one thing - and that she feels seen with Michael. By the time that gets out, CB shows up and does a hatchet job on Michael, specifically, uh, Michael's member. He has the decency to finish Michael Trent off and is about to start on Taffy but Lisa stops him. They exit the now blood spattered room and traumatized Taffy.

Earlier, Lisa yelled at her Resurrected Pal about the mess she, they, were in. Janet was an accident; Doug was premeditated, but she refuses to take responsibility for Janet, though Doug was her idea. The confusion wells up and a curtain call for Michael seemed preordained, scripted, but preordained. 

They manage to smooth things over and it becomes clear to Lisa that she's been in denial about her attraction to a revived corpse that is looking ever more like Cole Sprouse. He offers his service to her and she realizes that his docking of Michael Trent's dick wasn't merely meting out a punishment. She sews the appendage on, they make a quick trip to the tanning bed, and lo! Full on handsome Sprouse Creature with a functioning unit and voila, a romantic interlude of dramatic lighting saturated colors, and deflowered Lisa later. There's only one thing left to do; Lisa enters the bed, Sprouse creature turns the janky machine up to full blast, burning his love and the house. 

In the aftermath, Dale and Taffy visit Lisa's grave and Taffy's eye settles on something. She replies "nothing" when Dale asks, but in quite lovely handwriting on the tombstone are the words "Beloved Wife". A tracking shot over to a park bench reveals the two Resuscitated Significant Others(2) on the bench, he reading poetry to her (perhaps a nod to Grant and Roberts in Notting Hill?), as she lies mummy-like swathed in bandages. I missed it, but her headstone was struck by lightning, so the assumption is that she came back as he did, they got him a tongue - which means some poor bugger met a tasty end - and it's likely that Lisa, too, will find her way back to Undead Wholeness. 

...and so the two Zombies lived happily ever after....

Now for the notes. As I've mentioned, I do like this movie, probably more than most, and if I find it not as intense as I'd like, there's enough of the macabre to have kept me interested. But what I really enjoyed was Newton's Lisa and her dealing with everything besetting her. Sure, killing people isn't the best solution for dealing with the violent death of your mother or adolescence, in general, but I think that's why I'm fond of her. In some ways, Lisa Frankenstein is precisely the teenage wish fulfillment I wished had been around when I was in high school. 

Of course, Lisa is by turns, withdrawn, self absorbed, feels neglected, and acts erratically and selfishly; but Cody's script frames this instability with precision. Even the idea of the Creature being stuck in her closet initially reads as a metaphor for all the things we can't tell anyone about for fear of ridicule or worse. That trouble really begins when he comes out of the closet is a sad end to the metaphor, but it does often mean that we can't stuff everything down and away forever. 

There is also a subtlety in the script that at first, I found tacked on or tucked into it uncomfortably. After the slaughter of Michael, Lisa attempt to comfort Taffy, pretty much confessing to murdering her mom and apologizing for the horror she's visited upon her, particularly after Taffy had really gone out of her way to make her feel welcome in Lisa's new home. 

Lisa's confession creates a call-back to review their interactions throughout the film. Soberano's take on Taffy is that she is a genuinely kind person, if clueless and not the sharpest tool in the box. Her admission to Lisa when caught in bed with Michael is the talk they should have had early on; but then, don't we regret the things we don't say as much as those we do?

There are bumps and timing issues in the movie that are somewhat distracting. Unlike some, I didn't find the first act too long in getting things going, but I did find some of the rhythms of the film to be off. As much as the start-stop approach worked in many scenes where Cody's dialog felt like the pace setter, it also bedeviled some sequences that required a more generous amount of space for the actors. Additionally, it's just plain hard for landings to stick in films like this because so much feels like plot armor or worse, add-ons after the fact. 

Scant regard is paid to Lisa's loss is the most problematic of these. It could be argued that the entire film is her dealing with it; but that doesn't feel completely true. It's not that she's a happy-go-lucky kid after the first kill; it's just that so much other stuff has been concentrated on - by her - as so important, that we question just how important was her mom's murder? That the other kids think she's weird is a given; but she's not, really. She really is, beneath it all, a smart and we gather, literate, girl just trying to get through her last year of high school with her new family which includes her rather chirpy step-sister, and her evil witch step-mother, her increasingly distant dad.

Certainly, this is how a teen's family appears very often, anyway, but if you're going to introduce a violent tragedy, it needs to present itself with more substance. Again, if we take the entire narrative as Lisa's response, then sure, maybe that works; but there's so much that's really funny throughout that the tragic aspect is lost under a lot of teen angst.

Not that Zelda Williams has to go full-on Aronofsky, but she has a strong knack for the surreal and more touches of that might have bolstered the oddness the film seemed intent on using as a kind of bedrock for the narrative's aesthetic and even a significant part of its structure. Still, for a debut feature, I'm impressed.

While I enjoyed the setting - and the set design was spot on - I wonder if telling the story in a contemporary setting would have lent more emphasis to the points the filmmakers were making. My guess is that they wanted to use a pre-internet/pre-cellphone era for simplicity's sake, but it makes dismissing some of the cultural critique embedded in the film feel passé when it's still very much of the moment.

It's odd, too, that a number of critics are dunking on this movie for not being scary enough, or not funny enough, or too much of a pastiche. Scary? Is it supposed to be? Funny? We disagree. Too much of a pastiche? It's in the title; this is a Frankenstein film and that might account for the 80s milieu; homage and collaging all these elements from the Golden Age of Teen Flicks makes a tremendous amount of sense and adds to the metatextual nature of the script. 

It's fluffy, sure, but not without moments worth turning over. If I've gone on about it, it's mostly because I've found it more engaging than I thought it would be and I'm frankly surprised. Diablo Cody's a fine writer (see also Tully, Young Adult, Ricki and the Flash, etc.) and I get that some people might be expecting something more like Jennifer's Body - her second feature that died a horrible death and revived to become a beloved cult classic.

Expectations are often the surest path to disappointment; I had mine about this, admittedly, but I'm not disappointed.

Notes

1.  I really don't think Cody was going for an oral sex joke; it's way too cheap. 

2. Yes, I meant that as a RSO Speedwagon reference. "Can't Fight This Feeling" features prominently in the movie (and it's very sweet!)