Lisa Frankenstein

Directed by Zelda Williams, Lisa Frankenstein follows a teenage outcast (Kathryn Newton’s Lisa) as she and a revived corpse (Cole Sprouse’s Creature) begin dating. Filmmaker Williams, armed with Diablo Cody’s screenplay, delivers a predominantly intolerable endeavor that contains few, if any, elements designed to capture and sustain the viewer’s interest, as the movie has been infused with a pervasively (and aggressively) off-kilter sensibility that’s been hard-wired into its myriad of attributes – with, especially, the eye-rollingly quirky characters perpetuating the movie’s often astonishingly uninvolving arms-length atmosphere. (This is particularly true of Newton’s oddball figure, and it’s clear, certainly, that Lisa’s transformation from meek student to hardened killer is tough to swallow, to put it mildly.) There’s little doubt, as well, that Lisa Frankenstein‘s complete and total failure can be attributed to Cody’s laugh-free and frustratingly smug script, while the lack of forward momentum paves the way for a midsection and second half that feels absolutely endless – which, when coupled with a hopelessly anticlimactic final stretch, confirms the picture’s place as an almost shockingly awful misfire that feels much, much longer than its 101 minutes.

1/2* out of ****