Lisa Frankenstein

Reflections on a masterful tribute, and a diss of Rotten Tomatoes.

Lisa Frankenstein is one of my favorite movies of all time. It’s goth, colorful, fun, angry, romantic, and beautiful. It has brought so many people together, and is a more than worthy tribute to the original story of Frankenstein. It also has a 52% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is a fact that enrages me beyond belief.

So, today I am not only going to give you all a deep dive into what made Lisa Frankenstein so good, but also one into how critical reviews, like those on Rotten Tomatoes should be taken with a few handfuls of salt.

In reading reviews of Lisa Frankenstein on Rotten Tomatoes, an activity I don’t recommend, one thing was made very clear to me: Every person who watched it and disliked it missed the whole entire point. Every negative review has something to say about how it didn’t measure up to the original, or how it couldn’t decide what it was, or how it was too over the top. All of these reviews can be about boiled down to “I didn’t want to take this movie seriously, so I didn’t think about it past the surface level”. All of these critics looked at the bright colors, campy humor, tributes to other movies, and teenage protagonist, and decided this movie wasn’t worth their time. Most of the critic ratings weren’t even scathing, just mean and shallow, leading to the 52% overall critic rating.

By contrast, the popcornmeter, which is the audience reviews, had an overall 81%, high enough that Lisa Frankenstein would have been certified fresh had the audience had that say. This suggests to me that this is, in fact, a very good movie, it’s just that the wrong people for it got the loudest say.

The first thing I would like to point out about Lisa Frankenstein that I think is part of what these complaints are based on is that Lisa Swallows is not meant to be Victor Frankenstein. She is meant to be Mary Shelley. Mary Shelley learned to read by doing wax rubbings of gravestones, which is a hobby Lisa has. Mary Shelley also wrote Frankenstein as an excuse to hide during a party where she was trying not to be sexually assaulted by Lord Byron, like how Lisa accidentally brings the Creature to life after being sexually harrassed at a party. Lisa sews for a living, hand sews and does alterations like many women had to do during that time. I think a lot of people, especially critics who had to watch this movie for their job, thought that she was going to be a play on Victor Frankenstein, and then got mad when she wasn’t, instead of taking the change from their expectations in stride.

Another thing about Lisa Frankenstein that is, I think, the main reason that it got the critical reviews it did, is that it is very overtly feminine. As mentioned before, Lisa sews, a hobby that is traditionally viewed as feminine. She wears red lipstick and black eyeliner and elaborate dresses. And, more than that, the set design, lighting, and colors are all very feminine. There’s a lot of bubblegum pink and neons alongside all of the black that meant the movie wasn’t taken seriously by male critics.

Female directed horror getting bad reviews is nothing new, but it is disheartening. All movies, but especially horror movies, are far more likely to have low critic ratings if they were written or directed by women. This happened to Jennifer’s Body, Diablo Cody’s last movie before Lisa Frankenstein, and it happened to Lisa Frankenstein. Horror movies directed by women often get different, less reasonable, criticisms leveled at them than if the same movie had been written or directed by their male counterparts.

A main complaint that the critics on Rotten Tomatoes had about Lisa Frankenstein was that it didn’t know what it was. That it couldn’t decide between making fun of itself or taking itself seriously and being emotional. A movie written and directed by a man wouldn’t have had these complaints about it, because it would be assumed that the director was smart enough that it was both. Directed by a man, Lisa Frankenstein would have been praised for its layers and subtleties, but in the context of having been written and directed by two women, as well as being about a young woman, critics found it annoying.

The best way I can think to describe and explain the tone in Lisa Frankenstein is that it’s a slasher movie, but from the perspective of the slashers, and they are in a rom com. Lisa Frankenstein is a love story with murder attached. It is about finding love as one of the weirdos, but taken to a comical extreme. It is also about being a teenage girl. Lisa is eighteen, and her mother’s death has moved her to a new school, and she’s sad and scared and angry and she misses her mom, and everyone around her is telling her that she should just move on. So she gets mad. Lisa Frankenstein is about a young woman realizing that it is ok for her to have the emotions that she’s having about her life. As she goes through the movie, healing the Creature, she is also healing herself. Through Creature’s love for her and her emotions, she learns that she can love herself too, with all her anger and sadness. At the end of the movie, following a final electrocution in her sister’s tanning bed, Lisa is the one who is burned, brought back from the dead, and wrapped in bandages, while Creature is the one who is taking care of her. This shift shows that Creature has recovered from his emotions, the ones that came with being dead and forgotten, Unmarried the only thing on his gravestone. While Lisa has allowed herself to feel her emotions again, after a year of being told to ignore them, to begin taking steps towards recovery.

Now, all of this has made Lisa Frankenstein sound like a very sophisticated movie. And it is. It has levels upon levels of symbolism and references (another thing it got knocked for, by the way) and love and joy. It is also high camp.

Camp; n: A deliberately exaggerated and theatrical behavior or style.

Camp is a fine old tradition in both horror media and queer culture. Camp is feathers and sequins. Camp is neons, and flamboyance. Camp is also a minute-long sequence of a Victorian zombie chopping someone’s dick off in slow motion where the shadow of said dick flies across the wall with a dramatic blood spray as the song On The Wings Of Love plays in the background, followed by a scene in which that same dick is sewn onto the zombie so that, after he marries Lisa with peach rings, he can fulfill her wish to not die a virgin. Camp is a beautiful and joyous thing. It is the kind of exuberance that only comes from a deep, deep, well of love and emotion. It is both meant to be taken seriously and not, a fact which critics often have a very hard time with. Lisa’s rage in Lisa Frankenstein, while very serious and, in many ways, universal, is also very campily exaggerated. She cuts off the hand of the guy who groped her at a party so that Creature can have a new one. She yells at cops after being questioned about said guy being missing. She gleefully skips away from his grave while holding Creature’s hand to go sew a different guy’s dick onto Creature. Lisa Frankenstein is a story of feminine rage so greatly overblown that it reaches absurdity, in a way that makes a pretty spectacular point about how female rage is often treated in movies. This meant that male critics that were forced to watch it for their jobs absolutely hated it, while women and queer audiences that watched it because they chose to absolutely loved it.

To summarize, the things critics gave Lisa Frankenstein a hard time for are the same things that make it the masterpiece that it is. It is agressively feminine, with a main character that hand sews, wears cool dresses and makeup, and is a very angry teenage girl who is just learning to be happy. It was written and directed by women. It’s a fun twist on both slasher movies and rom coms. It has the same main message as the original book, about the pain inherent in living in a world that cannot understand you for who you are, and being treated like a monster for it. It is high, high, high, camp. And it is a glorious, gory, and gorgeous ride that made me cry at the end.