“They say time heals all wounds. But that’s a lie, time is the wound. Takes you further and further away from that place when you were happy. Makes those good smells go away.”
Zelda Williams has been busy in the industry working on short independent projects. The daughter of the late comedian Robin Williams has some good stuff in those genes, and she’s finally been given a feature project to play a little with those genes. So she teams up with the quirky Diablo Cody for a romp that feels a little too much at times like the cutting room floor for a Tim Burton film.
When I first saw the trailer for Lisa Frankenstein I was more than a little intrigued by the whole thing. I was disappointed that we weren’t provided with a press screening for the film, and my opportunity to see it anyway quickly evaporated along with the scarce few minutes the film was out at my local multiplex. Now, both of those things are really bad signs, but I tried to maintain that interest when the film was finally offered for review on Blu-ray a scant couple of months since its box office run. till I was not deterred from having a good time with what I hoped would be a funny little spoof on the classic horror themes with a little bit of teen angst thrown in for good measure. Certainly there were some of those things, but not enough to satisfy whatever it was I was hoping to see.
Lisa (Newton) is one of those socially awkward teen girls, and it leads to others being rather cruel, and her life pretty much sucks. It doesn’t help that her mother died and now her father (Chrest) marries her best friend’s mother Janet (Gugino), and yes, for some reason my mind kept wandering to Rocky Horror Picture Show with this one, and I had to remind myself that Dad’s name wasn’t Brad. Janet isn’t very nice to Lisa and has nothing but bad things to say. Instead the favorite is her own daughter, Taffy (Soberano). Taffy is the direct opposite from Lisa. She’s popular and always rather cheerful. She tries to be supportive of Lisa but isn’t as good a friend as she tries to be. Lisa has a crush on one of the jock boys but doesn’t really have a shot. So she relieves her life’s struggles by reading in a local cemetery where only bachelors are interred. She is kind of smitten by one such deceased guy and even brings gifts to his grave. One night while Lisa’s is wasted from a wickedly spiked drink, a strange bolt of green lightning strikes that grave, and guess who comes knocking on her door. Have you seen this before?
Throughout the film she grows a little closer to the mute creature, but she’s really doing the friend thing while he falls more and more in love with her. He’s missing a few parts, and after a few comedic murders they discover a way to return those parts to the creature, and he becomes more and more normal. The story plays out about as far as it can go, and while there really are some clever moments, neither Williams or Cody appear to have thought this thing out completely, and the ending is rather anticlimactic to say the least.
The disc contains a few short features.
There are some neat vintage Universal horror Easter eggs to be found throughout, and while I sure appreciated those moments, they appear to just be put out there. I don’t ever get the feeling that anyone here really understands any of that, because it’s missing so obviously from the film itself. I want so much to love this thing. I do like the idea that as the Creature is becoming more human, Lisa is actually becoming less so. All of the ingredients are here, but someone forgot the baking temperature, and the result is often clever, sometimes amusing,and mostly not stitched together like a good animated corpse’s hands ought to be. The style cops directly from Tim Burton, and it almost appears they were going for something like Beetlejuice before that anticipated sequel hits. I hope that Zelda Williams goes on to try again. I suspect there are some real chops there. It kind of runs in the family. But she needs to take her own advice while selecting her next gig. Don’t see it for what it could be. Look at what it is; after all: “it’s a waste of time to try and fix a boy. It’s better to just accept a guy’s flaws.”
