She meant that she wanted to be dead and buried in the ground with him, but that’s not how the universe takes it, and one ball of lightning later he has risen from the grave and shambled to her house. He’s in a dire state at first, time and worms having done their worst, but one thing leads to another and she discovers that by acquiring the body parts he lacks, stitching them on to him, and giving him a jolt from a malfunctioning sun bed, she can restore him to some semblance of humanity. The problem is where those body parts are coming from. Meanwhile she’s got a crush on the editor of the school literary paper...
Lisa Frankenstein is basically an attempt to make a lost film from the 1980s, albeit taking advantage of hindsight to pick cooler music than would actually have appeared in films back then: the first modern song the resurrected Creature hears is a wonderful Galaxie 500 track – for me, the highlight of the film. Teen films in the 1980s would tap into the desires of boys to get hot girls, like Weird Science, or of girls to get hot boys, like Pretty in Pink. There is that aspect to Lisa Frankenstein, but I think it’s really about what it’s like to be a woman who can’t rely on other women: the mother who died, the schoolmate who drugs her, the stepmother who bullies her, the stepsister who betrays her. And so she turns to the Creature.
The film prompted a lot of heated debate among our cinema squad. Partly because I thought it was by far the worst film I have seen all year, a failure on every level, in scale and quality reminiscent of a weaker episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But also because I thought the Creature, like the historical Dr James Barry, was female, and had adopted a masculine persona. I thought it was rather old-fashioned to use that as a twist, but it led me to read the film as the story of Lisa making a connection with a member of her sex she could actually trust. (Even if the Creature needed to hack a man to death to become, as Tasha Yar once put it, fully functional.)
The girls and women I was with all adored it, giving it four and five stars all round, and thought I was completely wrong about the Creature’s sex. Their view was that he’s just a bloke who lost his intimate bits to the worms, and needs to replace them just like his ear and his hand. So for them, it wasn’t a twist at all, let alone a corny one, and Lisa is more like Bonnie Parker, Veronica Sawyer, Alabama Whitman and all those other cinematic anti-heroines, a damaged young woman who takes up with a violent man who kills anyone who gets in their way. For them the film’s violence was cathartic, and who am I to say that they are wrong? I suspect people will be debating this aspect of the film for years to come.
The two lead actors, both very talented, aren’t terrible in this film, they’re fine, and they give it all they have. It’s just that they are in a film that isn’t that good, with a story and dialogue that, for me, didn’t hit the target. Don’t expect the inventive use of language that characterised Diablo Cody’s breakthrough film as a writer, Juno. Apart from a couple of animated sequences, it looks very bland and unappealing, like a 1980s film that hasn’t been remastered might look on television now, rather than how they looked to us back then on our shiny bright CRT screens. I didn’t think the film made much logical sense – Lisa makes drastic decisions with no reason to think the outcome would be what she wants – and I’m never keen on films that show suicide as a route to self-actualisation. So it’s one star from me, despite the daughters telling me that “you just don’t get it”. Stephen Theaker *
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