Diablo Cody’s latest DOA

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This article was published 10/02/2024 (819 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Built from the spare parts of better movies but never quite sewn together, this teen horror-comedy-romance from Oscar-winning scripter Diablo Cody and first-time director Zelda Williams is aggressively quirky, gruesomely unfunny and inexplicably bad.

Despite some game — and gamey — performances, Lisa Frankenstein remains stubbornly inanimate.

It’s 1989 and Lisa (Freaky’s Kathryn Newton) is having trouble fitting in at her new school. It’s never easy relocating in your senior year and it’s especially difficult when you’ve moved because your mom was murdered by a masked, axe-wielding maniac. (And while you might think this would be a major traumatic plot point, you would be wrong. It barely comes up again.)

Lisa’s weak, ineffectual father (Joe Chrest) quickly remarried, landing Lisa with a tightly wound, hyper-controlling stepmom (Carla Gugino) and her ghastly peach-and-aqua home.

At least Lisa has Taffy, her supportive new stepsister (Liza Soberano, in a promising debut). Taffy is a popular, pretty cheerleader, and according to high school movie tropes, would generally be set up as a Mean Girl, but here’s she’s genuinely sisterly.

Introverted, outcast Lisa has a silent crush on Michael (Henry Eikenberry from Euphoria), the cool, cerebral editor of the school literary mag, but she spends most of her time hanging out alone in an abandoned cemetery, tending the grave of a 19th-century bachelor with a rather soulful portrait bust.

After an eerie green lightning storm, his reanimated body (played by Riverdale’s Cole Sprouse) somehow comes alive and makes his way to Lisa’s bedroom.

The Creature shambles and grunts but cleans up fairly well with some deodorant soap and a Violent Femmes T-shirt. Soon Lisa and the Creature are working together to restore him, using a malfunctioning tanning bed, which is basically the ‘80s equivalent of the mad scientist’s lab.

They also need to pick up some missing body parts, which results in a bit of a killing spree.

The murders are strictly PG in terms of gore, but tonally they’re all over the place, as if the filmmakers can’t decide whether to be haplessly goofy or darkly nasty.

Indecision and incompetence plague almost every aspect of the story, which is packed with cultural riffs but can’t integrate them into anything original or even coherent.

There’s visible nostalgia here for teen horror-comedies like Weird Science and old-time creature features such as The Mummy and Creature from the Black Lagoon. The mutton-chopped Sprouse seems to be channelling Edward Scissorhands-era Johnny Depp, and there are Tim Burton flourishes, especially in the animated opening credits.

There are even highbrow references to the silent-film era. (Lisa has to explain that her fondness for Pabst involves an Austrian director and not cheap beer.)

The movie leans into the hard-edged, dayglo esthetics of its period setting and enjoys its ’80s-playlist soundtrack. Lisa’s hair is almost its own thing, crimped, teased and sprayed into an increasingly wild tangle as she morphs from a quiet, bookish girl into a high school hallway-owning goth queen.

This transformation is visibly underlined by outfits that call up Madonna in her black lace and tulle period. But what’s going on underneath? Cody never really tells us. She throws out some references to sexuality and rage and the notion that female adolescence is basically a horror show, ideas that have been much better explored in films such as Ginger Snaps and Cody’s own Jennifer’s Body.

But while Newton is doing her level best, Lisa’s character remains fatally undeveloped, as does her crucial relationship to the Creature.

The film’s general incompetence can partly be put down to rookie director Williams, who struggles to wrangle the script into shape.

But the script itself is disappointingly weak. Cody roared onto the scene in 2007 with Juno, a movie whose dialogue crackled and popped. She followed up with Jennifer’s Body, which tanked when it came out but has been more recently reclaimed as a feminist cult classic thanks to its upending of teenage horror tropes and its subversive deployment of Megan Fox.

Here the comedy is strained, the dialogue is dull, and the would-be feminist subtext is lazy and vague. This is a concept that never comes to life.

alison.gillmor@winnipegfreepress.com