I spent the majority of time wrestling with the tone of Lisa Frankenstein… did I like it? Was it too much? Was it not enough? Was ’80s Tim Burton looking over shoulders, deciding if he’s gonna sue? What was this wild and wooly flick?

Well, it’s about a goth chick named Lisa who prefer to hang out in forgotten cemeteries instead of making friends. When lightning strikes her favorite tombstone, the goth poet who was buried there comes back to life.

This is an odd, quirky film that never felt dark enough or quite quizzical enough for me. I kept frowning at its flibbertigibbet tone that felt like it needed more goth or black comedy in between its goth and black comedy. Something didn’t fit together quite right.

But eventually I just shrugged and decided the movie was going for its own tone. Though, even then, this ’80s set flick is clearly borrowing from the aesthetics and oddness of similar ’80s flicks. The most obvious being Edward Scissorhands… Cole Sprouse as the arisen dead sometimes looks so much like Johnny Depp without the scissors, I marveled at the audacity. But there’s also the dark tone of Heathers… though it’s far more twee than that superior film.

It’s certainly a weird watch with its own kind of dark, twisted humor. There’s a body count and various body parts stitched together but it never quite goes over the top (due, no doubt, to its PG-13 rating). But there’s definitely an earnest quirky darkness that can’t be missed. It’s a pretty blunt bit of oddness that’s going to leave some folk befuddled.

I could have gone either way but I decided to like the film. I rather wished I liked it more… but maybe that’s the difference between seeing Heathers or Edward Scissorhands in my teens and Lisa Frankenstein in my not-teens. I bet this flick is gonna speak to someone in some maligned generation or clique.

Score: 81