Rating: D
Dir: Zelda Williams
Star: Kathryn Newton, Cole Sprouse, Liza Soberano, Henry Eikenberry
Dear Hollywood. For the love of god, stop trying to make Diablo Cody happen. She is the ultimate one-hit scriptwriting wonder. We are approaching seventeen years since Juno, and not one film she has written in that time has made even $50 million at the worldwide box-office. Her entire output combined falls more than $100 million short of what Juno took in. Here’s the dismal track record of Cody-penned features since then:
- Jennifer’s Body: $31.6m
- Young Adult: $22.9m
- Paradise: $19.6K [yes, K – her directorial debut didn’t earn enough for a used pick-up]
- Ricki and the Flash: $41.3M
- Tully: $15.6M
- Lisa Frankenstein: somewhere sub-$10M
The last is particularly embarassing, delivering one of the worst wide openings ever, alongside movies which opened during COVID-19. In other words, Cody isn’t box-office poison, she’s a goddamn box-office global pandemic. Consequently, Lisa hit streaming services a mere eighteen days after its formal theatrical debut, surely a record for a film released on 3,144 screens. And that’s why we’re here. Up to me, and I wouldn’t have bothered: Diablo goes her way, I go mine, and everyone’s happy. But Chris had it on her list to see. What loving husband could do less? I didn’t expect much. I wasn’t expecting to like it. I kinda hoped I might hate it with the fury of a thousand burning suns. That would at least have been an experience.
Instead, this is resoundingly meh. The great bulk of it just… sits there. Which is quite some feat, considering the dramatic climax is a teenager having sex with a reanimated dead body, whose penis she recently sewed on. Oh, did I mention that this “I can’t believe she fucked the corpse” production is rated PG-13? That should give you some idea of how utterly toothless it is. It’s clear the vibe for which it’s aiming is sweetly creepy. If I was to come up with an elevator pitch, it’d be something like “Edward Scissorhands with vibrator jokes.” But it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work as horror. It doesn’t work as comedy. It doesn’t work as romance. It doesn’t work as social satire. It doesn’t work.
This is the same old, same old. Back in 2011, Diablo Cody said journalists “would ask me why I was obsessed with writing about teenagers. I had to think about it. Because I wasn’t sure myself. And I started to go to a dark place and I thought, ‘What if I’m actually just living vicariously through these characters and I’m just a stunted adult who’s immature and who hasn’t progressed passed an adolescent stage of life?’” Here we are, a dozen years later, and guess what? Cody, now 45, is still writing about horny teenagers. It’s now bordering on “Hello, fellow kids!”. I think she may desperately be trying to recapture the success of her one and only success. But nobody cares. Even Juno now can be read as a pro-life movie.
However, this feels closer to a retread of Jennifer’s Body, and is not particularly subtle about it. Except, instead of actually having the guts to show the teenage girl doing the killing of those who (in some sense, more or less) abuse her, the murder gets outsourced to a man. And it’s a perfect man too, one who never says anything, or makes any demands on you. Though I should really put quotes round teenage, since “high-school students” Newton and Soberano were aged 27 and 26 at the time of release, which make Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfriend in Body almost look credible as teenagers. It’s also set in 1989, for no necessary reason I could discern, except Cody wanting to work some fave eighties tunes in (though only the cheap ones).
There really isn’t much plot to speak of. Lisa Swallows (Newton) is your typical outsider, who hangs around in cemeteries. An errant lightning strike resurrects a young man (Sprouse) who died in 1837. He kills Lisa’s step-mom and a schoolmate who almost sexually assaulted Lisa, then removes with an axe the dick of Michael (Eikenberry), her crush, after Lisa finds him in bed with her step-sister, Taffy (Soberano). She uses parts from these victims to replace the missing ones on the creature – using a tanning bed, in one of the film’s few amusing ideas. In a reversal of the usual theme, the monster ends up destroying the creator… kinda. I can’t say the ending makes much sense, any more than the Regency era creature knowing how to drive.
The pleasures to be found here are slight. Taffy is actually a considerably better character than Lisa: engaging, endearing and not too bright. When Lisa tells her that Michael “doesn’t play sports, he’s cerebral”, she responds with obvious concern, “He’s in a wheelchair?” She has a Hawaiian beach scene on the dashboard of her car. But she cares for her stepsister in a way Lisa doesn’t seem to care for anyone, and the film never gives you good reason to engage with the protagonist. While not easy, it is possible to make a teenage girl who is involved in homicides sympathetic. The gulf between Veronica Sawyer from Heathers and Lisa Swallows is big enough to bury an entire town’s worth of dead bodies.
Though she produced it as well, I would be wrong to lay the blame for everything at Diablo’s feet. Not when the director’s entire filmography prior to this consists of one short film about dominatrices. I don’t like the term “nepo baby.” But I strongly suspect that being the daughter of Robin Williams is going to open a lot of doors for you, with regard to getting an eight-figure budget and a nationwide release for your next effort. I mean, technically, it’s hardly incompetent. If $13 million can’t buy you something which looks and sounds okay, there are issues. However, in terms of tone and approach, it feels like the studio went on Temu and ordered a Tim Burton movie. I hope they kept the receipt, because that’s the only hope of recouping their investment.
Inevitably, Cody’s fans – yes, they exist! – are proclaiming it a cult classic in the making, misunderstood now and only appreciated down the road. There is some precedent, with Jennifer’s Body being reappraised and having acquired a certain regard in some circles (even though it still ain’t great). But it’s very hard to see what this might bring to the table in that department, lacking the dubious “edge” of Body. Even the title here, a pun on a school supply company (hey, based in Tucson – Arizona connection!) popular in the late eighties, is weak sauce. I would not be at all surprised if this ends up a footnote in the already largely forgettable post-Juno career of Cody, as well as anyone else involved in it.