Film Review

Lisa Frankenstein (2024) — camp comedy unlikely to become a classic

A coming-of-age love story about a teenager and her crush, who happens to be a corpse.

Lisa Frankenstein wants you to cuddle up on the couch and experience something fun. This film is self-consciously made for a sleepover; for a basement full of teenagers sat on beanbags and under blankets. It’s not perfect, but its imperfections are likely purposeful. It aims to deliver lines that fans will quote for the next decade. Lisa Frankenstein wants to be the latest camp classic, but it unfortunately lands short of the mark.

The film opens to find the eponymous character, Lisa Swallows (Kathryn Newton), whose mother was killed by an axe murderer, navigating an abandoned graveyard. She’s there to visit the bust of a handsome 19th-century man and adorn it with another of her gifts. Later that evening, as fate would have it, the bust is struck by lightning, miraculously granting life to an unnamed Frankenstein’s Monster-esque zombie (Cole Sprouse).