This is what happens when 50-year-old women try to do edgy teenage humor. 

Diablo Cody is an Enigma regarding her standing in Hollywood. Whenever the screenwriter teams up with Jason Reitman, they produce movies worthy of awards season nominations. Whenever Diablo Cody is left to her own devices as a screenwriter, things go off the rails.

If there was anyone in the business in desperate need of a filter, Diablo Cody is the textbook example. Unfortunately for Focus Pictures, Cody’s filter for this film is Zelda Williams, daughter of the late great comedian Robin Williams. Zelda has never been responsible for a Major motion picture film in her life, And Hollywood thought teaming her up with Diablo Cody would be a good step in the right direction.

Well just like someone who has the bright idea of becoming their electrician,  things don’t always pan out the way that you want which gives us the film Lisa Frankenstein. 

Set in the 1980s,  Lisa Frankenstein is a story about a socially awkward Outcast named Lisa Swallows (Kathryn Newton) who isn’t well-liked by her peers and is liked even less by her stepmother Janet (Carla Gugino). The only person who seems to like Lisa is her stepsister Taffy. One night, Lisa is invited to a house party that gets a little crazy when Lisa accidentally drinks a spiked drink and wanders off to a Grave’s yard that she frequents and makes a wish to be with a young man who was buried at the site.

To her surprise, her wish comes true when the Reanimated corpse (Cole Sprouse) comes into her life giving Lisa her first true friend.  To the surprise of no one, things go wrong when Lisa discovers that the creature tends to murder a lot. After killing a couple of people in her town the duo is stuck trying to figure out how they are going to get away with the fact that every missing person in the town relates to them.

One of Hollywood’s biggest pet peeves these days is that the industry believes it is talented enough to master two genres in one movie even though it falls short of managing one. What’s the point of being a horror comedy when you’re not good at being scary?  What’s the point of a horror comedy when you’re not good at being funny?  Lisa Frankenstein is a film that fundamentally fails at the two genres it is based around.

The film tries to blind you with aesthetics from the 1980s which is used as a device to distract the audience from the complete and utter lack of storytelling and characters the film has to offer.  Kathryn Newton is known for her spunky personality however any Charisma that she brings to the movie is nullified by a script that draws nothing but pure and uncut boredom from his audience.

It takes 15 to 20 minutes for all the steam of this movie to be sucked out leaving audiences with nothing but questions about why they are even watching said film. Newton’s character is turned into the modern-day unlikable female protagonist, a character that is presented to audiences that they should identify with. The problem is our protagonist is such a horrible person, there is no way that anyone who doesn’t hate their parents will see her as likable in any way shape or form.

A movie written by awful people that can only be identified by awful people is a film that is going to win the hearts of nobody. Cole Sprouse is a decent actor who is relegated to being a mindless zombie who doesn’t speak until the last shot of the film rending his charisma null and void.

The film’s idea of comedy is watching terrible things happen to people who are guilty of the sins of mildly inconveniencing our unlikable protagonist. One character is killed for the sin of being an awkward nerd who grabbed her boob at a party while they were both drunk. Another character gets his penis chopped off for the sin of being more attracted to her stepsister than her.  This is what the film is going for in terms of its hysterical sense of humor.

The film tries so hard to recreate the charisma and style that Christian Slater and Winona Ryder were able to create in Heathers but this film is so bad that the editors didn’t even notice that they left footage of the same background actors walking in the same scene multiple times in the same shot.

The best way to describe Lisa Frankenstein is Amateur Hour. Don’t let the funky colors and 1980s music fool you into thinking that this film has any style or soul.  The only thing that was achieved with this film is solidifying a spot in the top 10 worst movies of 2024 just 6 weeks into the new year.

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