Diablo Cody's latest DOA – Winnipeg Free Press

Constructed from bits and pieces of better movies but never stitched together, Academy Award-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody and first-time director Zelda Williams' teenage horror-comedy-romance is aggressively funny, wildly funny, and inexplicably bad.

Despite some gaming and gaming performances, Lisa Frankenstein stubbornly becomes lifeless.

It's 1989 and Lisa (SpecialKatherine Newton) is having trouble adjusting to her new school. Since your mother was murdered by a masked, axe-wielding maniac, it's not easy to relocate during your senior year, and it's especially difficult when you do. (And even if you think it's a major traumatic event, you'd be wrong. It rarely happens again.)

Lisa's weak, ineffectual father (Joe Crest) quickly remarries, placing Lisa with her deeply traumatized, highly controlling stepmother (Carla Gugino) and her hideous peach-and-aqua house.

At least Lisa has Taffy, her new stepsister (Lisa Soberano, in a promising debut). Taffy is a popular, cute cheerleader, and according to high school movie tropes, is usually labeled as the average girl, but here she is, in fact, a sister.

An introverted, withdrawn Lisa loves Michael silently (Henry Eikenberry Euphoria), the cool, intelligent editor of the school's literary magazine, but he spends most of his time alone in an abandoned cemetery tending to the grave of a 19th-century bachelor.

After a terrifying green lightning bolt, his animated body (played by Riverdale's Cole Sprouse) somehow survives and ends up in Lisa's bedroom.

The creature shivers and shakes, but cleans up well with deodorant soap and a Violent Femmes t-shirt. Lisa and Genesis soon work together to restore him, using a malfunctioning solarium that's basically the 80s equivalent of a mad scientist's lab.

They also have to pick up some missing body parts, which leads to a bit of a kill.

The murders are strictly PG, but tonally they're all over the place, as the filmmakers can't seem to decide whether to be goofy or darkly nasty.

Indecisiveness and helplessness affect almost every aspect of history, which is full of cultural riffs but fails to integrate them into anything original or even coherent.

There's nostalgia for teenage horror comedies here Weird science such as ancient creature features Mummy and Creature from the Black Lagoon. Sprouse looks like he's channeling chopped mutton Edward ScissorhandsThere are Johnny Depp-era and Tim Burton flourishes, especially in the animated opening credits.

There are even lofty references to the silent film era. (Lisa has to explain that her love for Pabst is not cheap beer, but an Austrian director.)

The film leans on the hard-edged, daytime aesthetic of its period and hearkens back to its 80s playlist soundtrack. Lisa's hair is only her own, scrunched up, teased, and increasingly wildly tangled as she transforms from a quiet, bookish girl into a goth princess who owns a high school hallway.

This transformation is clearly illustrated by Madonna's black lace and tulle period. But what's going on underneath? Cody never tells us. It makes some references to sexuality and anger, and notions of teenage women being horror shows, ideas that are much better explored in movies. Ginger snaps and Cody's Jennifer's body.

But while Newton does a good job on her level, Lisa's character is very underdeveloped, as is her significant relationship with the creature.

The overall ineptitude of the film can be attributed in part to new director Williams struggling to whip the script into shape.

But the script itself is very weak. Cody appeared on the scene in 2007 Juno, a film whose dialogue is shaky and cracked. He followed jennifer's body it flopped when it came out, but has recently been resurrected as a feminist cult classic thanks to the rise of teen horror tropes and a subversive Megan Fox placement.

Here, the comedy is strained, the dialogue murky, and the future feminist subtext lazy and vague. This is a concept that will never come to life.

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Alison Gillmore
Writer

Alison Gillmore, who attended the University of Winnipeg and then York University in Toronto, planned to become an art historian. He caught the journalism bug in 1992 when he started working as a fine arts columnist for the Winnipeg Free Press.

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