LISA FRANKENSTEIN

LISA FRANKENSTEIN is a horror comedy about a teenage girl in 1989 who eventually falls in love with a young man from the early 1800s whose corpse is reanimated by a lightning strike, after the “romantic” couple goes on a murder spree, starting with the girl’s mean stepmother. The beginning of LISA FRANKENSTEIN has some clever, funny moments, but the movie degenerates from there into a lawless, abhorrent, unsatisfying murder spree that also involves castration.

The movie starts with a credit sequence showing a series of silhouette cutouts of a young man and a young woman in the early 1800s starting a romance. Sadly, the man wanders through a park and sits on a bench, where lightning strikes him dead.

Cut to 1989. A teenage girl named Lisa Swallow is still mourning her mother’s death at the hands of an axe-wielding serial killer. Lisa cherishes the rosary beads her mother gave to her, although she shows no actual signs of faith. Sadly, her stepmother seems to loathe Lisa, and Lisa’s father is clueless and totally inattentive. Lisa, who works part time as a seamstress at a dry cleaner’s shop, spends some of her time at the decrepit cemetery where she is attracted to the gravesite where the young man from the 1800s is buried. She periodically brings flowers to his gravesite.

Lisa’s stepsister, Taffy, clearly cares for her and offers Lisa, who has pale skin, the use of a tanning bed Taffy won at a beauty contest. There’s an important high school party that evening, and Taffy wants Lisa to look good at it. However, the tanning bed shorts out, and Lisa gets an electric shock from it, but she survives.

Later that night, at the party, an evil classmate spikes Lisa’s drink with PCP. Lisa wanders the party in a stupor, and a nerdy lovesick guy tries to sexually assault her. Lisa escapes, however, and wanders into the cemetery, where she tells the dead man in his grave that she wishes she were dead like him.

Lisa wanders back home. Meanwhile, at the cemetery, a flash of green lightning strikes the dead man’s grave, and his corpse is reanimated. With her parents and stepsister away for the evening, the “Creature” crashes into Lisa’s home through the French windows downstairs and terrifies her. Mute, he soon calms her fears. So, she hides the Creature in her closet when her parents return home. Of course, Lisa’s evil stepmother blames her for the broken French doors, and her father doesn’t even try to defend her.

Lisa later notices the Creature is missing his left ear and his right hand. He’s also dirty and smelly. So, she tries to clean him up. However, sometimes worms and bugs fall out of his mouth.

One day, while Lisa’s away at school, the Creature wanders the house while Lisa’s stepmother is doing her exercises and eating breakfast cereal. One of the little creatures inside his body falls into the stepmother’s cereal. So, when Lisa returns home from school, the stepmother starts screaming at Lisa for trying to poison her. She threatens to send Lisa to an insane asylum, so the Creature emerges from Lisa’s bedroom closet and knocks the stepmother dead with a blunt object. He also cuts off her ear and, though he can’t speak, silently asks Lisa to sew the woman’s ear onto his missing left ear. Lisa does this, and the Creature pantomimes to her that a burst of electricity can reanimate the ear. So, they reanimate the ear with the broken tanning bed and bury the stepmother’s body.

It just so happens that the stepmother was going away for a few days to attend a work conference. So, Lisa and the Creature make it appear as if the stepmother drove away in her car to catch her plane to the conference. That way, when Lisa’s father and her stepsister finally return home, they will think nothing of the stepmother’s absence that evening.

Lisa and the Creature then decide to commit another murder, to find a replacement for the Creature’s missing right hand. The target? The obnoxious nerdy guy who put his hand on Lisa’s breast at the party.

The beginning of LISA FRANKENSTEIN has some clever, funny moments. However, the movie devolves into lawlessness with the evil stepmother’s murder. In fact, instead of bringing the Creature to justice, Lisa becomes complicit in the crime, and more. So, ultimately, it’s hard to see any moral purpose to this story when the final frame occurs, despite the movie’s references to the late beloved mother’s rosary beads with the crucifix.

In fact, although they aren’t lovers at first, the relationship between the title character, Lisa, and the Creature, reminds MOVIEGUIDE® of the relationship between the English Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s, relationship with his second wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the author of the original FRANKENSTEIN novel. Although the Creature in the movie remains devoted to Lisa, Shelley has a lawless Romantic philosophy which led him to cheat on both Mary and his first wife, according to historian Paul Johnson in his 1988 book INTELLECTUALS. Reportedly, Shelley justified his behavior by allowing his two wives to be unfaithful too, but the women reportedly found such behavior distasteful. Hence, the Creature and Lisa develop a lawless philosophy that allows them to commit murder and mutilation, including, in one scene, castration. LISA FRANKENSTEIN also has a slightly excessive amount of foul language, some sexual immorality, and bloody violence that goes a little too far in two scenes.

Ultimately, therefore, despite its promising beginning, a beginning that should have led to a classic, and more classy, horror comedy, LISA FRANKENSTEIN ends up in an abhorrent, disappointing place. Consequently, MOVIEGUIDE® finds the movie unacceptable.

By the way, it should be noted that spiking anyone’s drink, especially a young person’s drink, with mind-altering drugs is a really dangerous thing to do. It can really mess up a person for the rest of their life. There are many documented cases of promising young people whose lives were irretrievably harmed, if not totally destroyed, by someone who secretly dropped a powerful drug into their drink. One of MOVIEGUIDE®’s editors once met such an adult person whose promising life and brain were terribly harmed by such an incident in high school, according to a friend of the person whom the editor also met at the time.