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‘Lisa Frankenstein’ Review: Diablo Cody Scripts a Faux Outrageous Undead Teenage Horror Comedy That Never Finds Its Joke
Kathryn Newton stars in Diablo Cody's unfunny camp homage to the teen-girl-vs.-the-suburbs 1980s.
The tropes of horror comedy go back a long way; the genre probably dates to “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein,” released in 1948, with a few electro-roots in “The Bride of Frankenstein.” Yet the good ones all share something: a combo of flavors — scary and funny, violent and knockabout — that’s bold and tart and bracingly blended. I personally think she’s already transcended this kind of material (her two best films after “Juno” are the ultra-realistic “Young Adult” and the empathetic nanny fantasy “Tully”), but her brand is edge, and “Lisa Frankenstein,” while neither scary nor funny (the way Zelda Williams has directed it, it sits in some corkscrew zone that feels more like “overly complicated SNL sketch”), skims off the top of a dozen once-cool sources. By the time Lisa confronts the literary-magazine editor (Henry Eikenberry) she has a crush on, who is now in bed with her stepsister, Sprouse and his blade go right for the offender’s most precious part, which goes flying into the air in silhouette, to the two-ton ironic schlock tune of “On the Wings of Love.” If you’re not laughing yet, at no point ahead will you be.
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