Lisa Frankenstein review – lumbering teen zombie romcom by Diablo Cody

The screenwriter’s mashup of 80s teen horror tropes falls flat in Zelda Williams’s erratic feature debut

Cobbled together from the cleavered-off body parts of numerous 80s horror-lite teen comedies (I’m not sure I have ever seen a film that more desperately wants to be Heathers), this Athena-poster-hued, girl-meets-corpse romcom never fully reanimates. It’s a misfire from Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody, who usually manages, at the very least, to inject a few solid jokes into her material.

Kathryn Newton stars as Lisa, an introvert even before her mother was murdered, her father remarried and she found herself with a new school and a judgmental, lemon-faced stepmother (Carla Gugino). Lisa finds it hard to socialise, so she spends her spare time in the local abandoned cemetery. But then a midnight wish backfires and a lumbering, malodorous corpse lurches into her life. On a poorly explained whim, Lisa hides him in her wardrobe; he becomes her confidant and her partner on a neighbourhood killing spree.