Note to Film & TV Producers: We Are Revoking Your 80s Nostalgia Privileges

There's an interesting concept in 'Lisa Frankenstein,' but it's buried under all the too familiar nostalgia baiting.

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Focus Features

It’s fitting that I saw Lisa Frankenstein the same day as this Dane Cook tweet: “In 1986 you would come home from school, eat a snack, jump on your bike and ride around all day looking for adventure.”

Most of the reason I saw the tweet at all was because of how many people immediately jumped in to dunk on it. Rather getting than the reaction Cook probably hoped for — evoking a pleasant memory or whatever — people on my timeline mostly identified the tweet for what it actually was: cheap engagement bait. Hey, people love the 80s, right?

It’s hard to take the tweet at face value, because pop culture has already been so steeped in 80s tropes for the past ten years that it’s impossible to believe Dane Cook is actually remembering the real 80s here and not just an episode of Stranger Things he could’ve watched five minutes ago.

And is it even possible to watch Stranger Things itself and feel like it’s actually about the 80s, and not just an homage to ET and Stand By Me and The Goonies and whatever else? “Kids riding bikes doing adventures” is just stock poster imagery for the 1980s, totemized and drained of its personal connection to anyone. It becomes impossible to differentiate heartfelt personal recollection from pandering, derivative pastiche. And that’s a great sign that we’ve reached the end of a 20-year nostalgia cycle.

Which brings us to Lisa Frankenstein, a potentially interesting high concept teen movie buried underneath layers of too-familiar 80s touchstones. Why bother figuring out the story when you can just stuff in an REO Speedwagon sing along (two REO Speedwagon sing alongs, if we’re getting specific) and a montage set to “Wave of Mutilation” by the Pixies? I like the Pixies too, but instead of feeling a connection I mostly just feel corny and exposed, things I enjoy easily intuited by the algorithm based solely on demographic data and then fed predictably back to me. Be a good piggie and eat your nostalgia slop!

Most of the reason I wanted to see it in the first place is that Lisa Frankenstein was a script by Diablo Cody, of Juno/Young Adult/Tully/Jennifer’s Body fame. People tend to associate her movies with the particular kitsch of whatever time period accompanies their release, to the point of sometimes forgetting the provocative storytelling and sharp dialog that make them work. Her stuff is generally smart and slick, which is why she’s one of a very small handful of “name” screenwriters who don’t also direct.

Lisa Frankenstein (and maybe it’s even harder to see past the 80s kitsch when the title itself is a pun on Lisa Frank, the brand of neon school supplies) stars Kathryn Newton as Lisa Swallows, a high school outcast in 1989 with a tragic backstory. Her mom was murdered by an axe-wielding home invader, leaving her stuck in an unhappy suburban blended family with her checked out dad (Joe Chrest), a loopy new stepmom who hates her (Carla Gugino), and a popular same-age stepsister who does her best to include Lisa, but can’t help overshadowing her (Taffy, played by Liza Soberano) solely by being more like what society expects of teen girls (Taffy is a cheerleader, obviously).

Lisa, alienated from her peers and family, escapes into fantasy at an abandoned Victorian cemetary, where the cement bust of a dead Lord becomes her main confidant. One night a lightning storm reanimates the Lord (Cole Sprouse), and, utilizing her seamstress skills and Taffy’s malfunctioning tanning bed, Lisa sets about simultaneously perfecting her ideal male companion and getting revenge on everyone who has wronged her.

It’s a fun pitch, and throughout there are sporadic glimpses of Diablo Cody’s signature wit. “John bought a keg with his fake ID and Derek stole a tank of nitrous from his dad’s dentistry practice,” Taffy pitches a party in one early scene. Later on, when the dead Lord starts to cry, Lisa tells him, “Please don’t cry, your tears smell like a hot toilet at a carnival.” Also, “Lisa Swallows?” Great name.

Yet where Cody had seasoned directors at the helm of her previous films (Jason Reitman in Juno, Young Adult, and Tully; Karyn Kusama in Jennifer’s Body), in Lisa Frankenstein she has Zelda Williams (yes, Robin’s daughter) in Williams’ first feature. Lisa Frankenstein is a wild high concept where deaths are often played for laughs and cheesy songs are meant to anchor dramatic moments, which would be tough to pull off for any director. It desperately needs a signature visual style and a unifying sense of reality to bring it together, and Williams mostly just doesn’t provide it. Sight gags don’t come off and there are scenes in Lisa Frankenstein that fail just on a basic level of conveying the visual information necessary to move along the story.

There are interesting things happening in this story that just get buried or muddled by the 80s setting. While it feels like it was the pitch, it isn’t immediately clear that Lisa even wants the dead guy to be her boyfriend. In the very first scene, Lisa reveals to Taffy her crush: Michael Trent, the editor of The Grackle, the school’s literary magazine. “I don’t know who that is,” Taffy says. “Is he like a football guy or a basketball guy?”

“Neither,” Lisa answers. “He’s… cerebral.”

Then when we actually meet Michael a few scenes later, he’s played by Henry Eikenberry, who seems basically like the epitome of a tall, handsome, broad shouldered jock. As Bill Murray says in The French Dispatch, “Whatever you do, just try to make it seem like you did it on purpose.” It’s hard to tell whether the “cerebral” guy not looking at all like a cerebral guy was a deliberate choice here or a casting and styling mistake.

That aside, when Lisa first brings her dead Lord back to life, it feels like she’s intent on turning him less into her romantic partner than into her confidant, who will boost her confidence and help her “get the guy,” the guy being Michael Trent. This does feel like a deliberate choice, and it’s a good one: it’s more interesting that she has reanimated a Ducky instead of a Blane (if you know your Pretty in Pink). Even better if the dead guy comes back to life thinking she wants him for love, when really she just wants a sort of Manic Pixie Dream Corpse to give her the confidence to finally realize her true self.

But again here Lisa Frankenstein’s 80s setting works against the story. Lisa’s transformation from outcast to self-actualized Girlboss is meant to be symbolized partly by a change in personal style. She goes from dressing mousily (I guess?) to… cool(?) when she starts borrowing Taffy’s clothes. Except she’s wearing lacy black dresses and weird old lady hats that make her look like Winona Ryder in Beetlejuice. So that when people at Lisa’s school react to her like she’s suddenly hot, it’s confusing. Because wasn’t Winona Ryder in Beetlejuice sort of a goth outcast? Again, is this a choice, or did some style lines get crossed causing the period touchstones to come out garbled and mistranslated?

She’s supposed to be dressed for work, but it looks like she’s going to a costume party, or an orgy. (Focus Features)

Outside of up-and-comer Kathryn Newton and the typically divine Carla Gugino (who mostly disappears after the first act), the actors aren’t quite pulling it off either. Liza Soberano (already sort of a star in the Phillippines though she was raised mostly in California’s Central Valley) is uneven in the crucial role of Taffy, and Cole Sprouse, formerly of The Suite Life of Zach and Cody and its spinoffs, in the even crucialer role of the dead guy, still kind of has the stink of Disney on him (I didn’t know who he was until I looked him up, but I could sense it). We never really figure out who his character was or is, but then again we never get that clear a portrait of Lisa either.

All the cutesy kitchiness works against what could’ve been a pretty punky story. At the risk of spoiling things, a movie where a dead guy castrates a living guy and uses his sewed-on reanimated penis to deflower the protagonist should feel a lot more provocative than Lisa Frankenstein. Parts of the script feel like a great, pitch black comedy, while the execution always feels like a light basic cable romp.

Lisa Frankstein seems like it has a lot to say about pop culture pitting girls against each other, unfair expectations, and the way horny teens end up flattening each other into the consumerist “types” advertising has conditioned them to see at the expense of the many-faceted humans they actually are. Only instead of figuring out how to say all that through the story of a weird girl who gradually reanimates her dream boy with the help of a malfunctioning tanning bad, we get a sort of convoluted set of 80s touchstones and period fashion put through the standard pop culture nostalgia generator.

Maybe it’s time to put the BMXs back in storage for a while.