In a recent edition of Hill’s Horror, I talked about my excitement about seeing the new movie Lisa Frankenstein, and this past week I got the chance to go see it. Here’s my review:
Plot-wise, I did enjoy the plot. I think it was a REALLY creative retelling of such a classic story. The movie labeled it as a “coming of rage” story, and the trailer didn’t lie about that. We watched the main character spiral into a crazed character, and as much as I expected to like these changes in the main character, she also became more unlikeable.
The plot happens when lightning strikes a grave and brings back the corpse of a young man who is in love with his teenage gravekeeper. Upon his awakening, he seeks her out and asks her for help to collect some of his missing body parts that decomposed while he was underground using her faulty tanning bed.
Lisa labels herself as a “not like other girls” character from the very start of the movie, and while I do think that added to the comedic value, it felt just a little too clique for my taste. I think the creators of this movie were going for a “girlboss: she’s slaying literally” feel, but that’s not the vibe that it gave off. (However, I do believe that her first two kills of the movie, her evil stepmother and a boy who tried to sexually assault her at a party, were slightly girlboss of her.)
I will say that a lot of the jokes did fall under that clique category of “quirky” humor, but in a satirical way, and that did give me a good laugh. At one point in the movie, a guy tells a girl that “She’s so innocent and he doesn’t want to corrupt her with his dark soul.” I did get a good laugh out of this line.
I will say that the majority of the humor in this movie, while subtle, was funny, but the ending was really what made me question the movie.
Lisa finds out that her stepsister, Tammy (my personal favorite character from this film), is sleeping with a guy Tammy knew Lisa liked. The guy, however, had little to no interest in Lisa during the movie. Mad that the man slept with her stepsister and not her, she screams at them, and her corpse friend cuts off a very personal part of the boy’s body–traumatizing Tammy as she watches him die in the same bed.
The reason I found Tammy to be my favorite character was because during the movie, she was very funny, and actually did try to include Lisa in things, despite Lisa’s “I’m so odd; Nobody wants me around” attitude.
The real ending of the movie is when Lisa (SPOILER) uses the tanning bed to make herself a corpse, so she can spend the rest of her death with her zombie boyfriend.
The whole mood between Lisa and her zombie boyfriend throughout the movie really grossed me out. The romantic advances from the groups are slightly funny when Lisa rejects him towards the beginning of the movie, but towards the end, she takes a liking to him and it becomes necrophilic.
By the end of the movie she declares she doesn’t want to die a virgin and sleeps with said corpse. Maybe if he was ACTUALLY fully brought back to life this wouldn’t be as bad, but he is still rotting and decaying when they lay together. Some bugs even fall down on her.
This movie was advertised to be a new occult classic, and while I think it definitely had potential for that, the necrophilia-coded ending makes it hard to imagine most people giving this a second watch.
