Mary Shelley might crawl out of her grave to sue the makers of LISA FRANKENSTEIN for defamation of character. Stupid, unfunny and playing like a relic from the 80's sitcom era, this mega box office bomb should have stayed buried.
Diablo Cody burst on the screen back in 2007 with "Juno", which critics and audiences loved. I found her dialogue to be overblown in its complete lack of realism. People don't talk like she writes them.
Most of the best lines in this new effort don't land squarely either, feeling absurd while generating an occasional (very occasional) chuckle.
Here's Cody's idea of a hilarious line of dialogue:
"When you cry it smells like a hot toilet at a carnival!"
or how about this exchange:
Taffy:Does he have more of a basketball bod or a football bod?
Lisa: He doesn't play sports, he's cerebral.
Taffy: He's in a wheelchair?
Woof.
A very talented Kathryn Newton (Big Little Lies, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania) is wasted as teenager Lisa. She watched her Mother get chopped up by an axe murderer when she was young (laughing yet?) and now lives with her Dad and his horrible new wife, Janet (Carla Gugino). Gugino is just off the performance of her career in "The Fall of the House of Usher". Director Zelda Williams manages to direct the entire cast into strange, over-the-top mania. Poor Gugino suffers the worst.
So, Lisa is suicidal & unhappy, hanging out in the local defunct graveyard where she falls in love with a tombstone bust of a young man.
Conveniently for the story, that young man comes alive one night.
Why?
I don't know.
The movie is so clumsily written and directed that it's never shown.
It's stormy, there seems to be green lightning while Lisa gets high at a party and trips out, then The Creature breaks into Lisa's home and starts chasing her around the house.
She reacts by showing him how the shower works and hiding him in her closet. Huh?
Spinning around this are other tales of teenage outcasts and jocks and cheerleaders at the local high school. They are all so predictable and dull that they make any random episode of Glee seem like "The Blackboard Jungle".
This movie is LAZY.
I guess when you're so busy emasculating your creature, chopping off the male jock lead's equipment and murdering characters of every age without any remorse or consequence, there's little time to be creative.
Cole Sprouse, the "actor" who plays the creature, demonstrates so little star power that I started to think maybe they had cast an actual corpse.
This concept was done perfectly and creatively in 2013's "Warm Bodies", a film that shows more humor, heart and creativity in any random five minutes of its running time than LISA FRANKENSTEIN musters in it's entire, rotting 101 minutes.
DOA, LISA FRANKENSTEIN gets an F.
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