Diablo Cody has been one of those filmmakers who I feel everyone made a big deal about for a while and she read too much of her own press and still thinks it’s 2008. It might have seem odd in the 2000s for many people to show visible tattoos on their arms without thinking they were questionable types. I think critics and award show voters were more fascinated with how Cody could come out of nowhere and write a quirky comedy.
Unfortunately, Juno was the movie that made me initially despise Elliott Page back when he was Ellen. I feel that Cody was trying to hard to sound like Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino with the dialogue. But Oscar voters felt it was worthy. It was one of many awards she won, but the 2000s weren’t the best decade for American cinema. (But that’s a topic for a different post altogether.) We can see that Page has moved on since then but Cody is still stuck in arrested development of her career.
Just like Greta Gerwig would learn, if she didn’t have the critics fawning all over her movies, she wouldn’t exist. And then there was Jennifer’s Body, which was marketed wrong, but it still wasn’t too watchable. At the same time, she created the series United States of Tara. But with a new decade, she seemed to be lost. Young Adult came and went in 2011. And then there was Ricki and the Flash, which was Jonathan Demme’s final narrative movie before his death.
But a decade after Juno, it was apparent, no one really cared about Cody anymore. However, Tully had a raw humor to it how women today are expected to behave a certain way with husbands who utilize weaponized incompetence. Yet the problem with a lot of Cody’s movies is that you can sit through them once. However, there’s no desire to sit through them again.
The same thing can be said about Lisa Frankenstein, which feels like a script Cody wrote during the 1980s craze following the popularity of Stranger Things. But like a lot of movies set in the 1980s, it seems too focused on a fake style that never really existed outside of sitcoms. I’d bet that Cody and director Zelda Williams (daughter of Robin) both love the original Heathers, released in 1989, when this movie is set. And the opening title credits give a hint to the style of Tim Burton, Caroline Thompson and Henry Selick.
Yet the movie seems to never find its right standing. Lisa Swallows (Kathryn Newton) is the “weird girl” at a new school, who is still grieving over the axe-murder death of her mother. (You think something like this would come back in the final act, but it doesn’t.) Lisa is weird because the script calls for her to be weird as she listens to unpopular music of the time. You know, the same joke that was said about the “Pretty Ugly Girl” in Not Another Teen Movie all the way back in 2001.
It’s appropriate this movie is called what it is because it pieces together different items from other movies. It drags pieces of My Boyfriend’s Back, The Toxic Avenger, Edward Scissorhands, Warm Bodies and the Simpson “Treehouse of Horror” episode where Jerry Lewis voiced a scientist who killed people and took their body parts. That’s one thing most people should know before going into this movie. There’s quite a few deaths and murders along the way and it never transitions how Lisa can go from the awkward teen to helping the Creature (Cole Sprouse) kill people and take their body parts.
The PG-13 rating seems like this could have been a darker movie before the studio demanded it be toned down. I’m still wondering how a person’s penis can be chopped off without an R rating. I guess the editor worked with the ratings board down to every frame of what was and wasn’t acceptable. The movie also suffers from being released in the aftermath of the 1980s slasher comedy Totally Killer, released last year and Freaky which was released in 2020, also featuring Newton.
Unfortunately, Cody needs to fill the script with dialogue and Williams’ inexperience as a director makes for a very uneven movie. During the scene where the Creature first appears, after trying to escape, Lisa blabs a lot for a long period. The plot is meh. Carla Gugino pops up as Lisa’s stepmother, Janet, who apparently doesn’t like her for some reason, even though her stepsister, Taffy Soberano, gets along with Lisa.
All these pieces of a plot don’t come together to make a coherent story. It’s neither scary nor funny. Newton does what she can with the role but the character never really seems socially awkward for 1989 and when she changes her appearances by wearing sunglasses to school with darker clothes, it never really comes off as provocative as people say. I guess you could say Williams and Cody are mocking how the John Hughes movies often portrayed teens in an exaggerated way than what they were like in real life. This was also the year Saved by the Bell officially began airing.
But there’s an arrogant and sloppy way this movie insists upon itself I couldn’t get into it. And it’s failure at the box office along with mixed reviews shows a lot of people didn’t care for it. If Williams is going to be a director along with being an actress, she needs to start making her own movies, not something that looks like another filmmaker’s.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 