Review: Lisa Frankenstein

Image courtesy of Focus Features.

Zelda Williams' "Lisa Frankenstein" - which was penned by screenwriter Diablo Cody ("Juno" and "Jennifer's Body") - is a mostly unsuccessful attempt to capture the vibe of the early work of Tim Burton, namely "Beetlejuice" and "Edward Scissorhands." It's morbid and has a few laughs, but all adds up to a horror comedy that is missing the spark to make it spring to life.

The film follows the story of Lisa Swallows (Kathryn Newton), a goth-clad girl who has come to live with her inattentive father (Joe Chrest), her horror show of a stepmother (Carla Gugino), and her popular - but well-intentioned - stepsister, Taffy (Liza Soberano) in the wake of her own mother being murdered by a madman during a home invasion that only Lisa survived, a plot strand that is curiously undercooked and seemingly unnecessary.

Lisa is not particularly popular at her new school, and has a crush on the head of the school's literary magazine (Henry Eikenberry). But she spends much of her time at a local cemetery hanging out at the grave of a man (Cole Sprouse) who died young, but is somehow revived during a storm, another instance of an ill-explained plot thread. The film is set in 1989, so everyone is of course decked out in over-the-top clothing from that period.

The fact that the film is set in the 1980s seems to exist solely for the sake of the costume department, the ability to reference The Cure and include The Jesus & Mary Chain and When in Rome on the soundtrack, and because its source material - early Burton films - were from that era. Most of the other references - including an unexplainable sequence during which the resurrected young man plays piano and Lisa breathily sings along to REO Speedwagon's "Can't Fight This Feeling," a tune of which I was not aware was a goth standard - exist for no reason.

There are some funny moments scattered throughout. Lisa attempts to spruce up the resurrected corpse and there's a running joke that his tears smell - in Lisa's words - like "a toilet at a carnival." Most of the successful attempts at humor revolve around her aims to make him look the part of a young man in the late 1980s.

When the duo get involved in what can only be described as a killing spree - despite some of their victims being completely unsympathetic individuals - the film struggles to remain funny. There's a particularly grisly - for a PG-13 movie - sequence during which a character is separated from a specific body part that elicited some laughs during the screening I attended, but the manner in which the scene is shot plays much more horrifically than humorously.

Ultimately, "Lisa Frankenstein" is an empty exercise in pastiche. It's not as funny, lively, or bubbling with personality as the Burton films it is trying to mimic. "Beetlejuice" was significantly more engaging, and Edward Scissorhands cut a more dashing figure than the zombie who befriends Lisa in this film. Much like the character who has been revived from the dead, the film often just lumbers along.