'Lisa Frankenstein' review: It's monstrous

It will come as no surprise that the new movie “Lisa Frankenstein” is a real monster — stitched together from previous movies, painfully incoherent and deeply, deeply dumb.

Kathryn Newton stars as the goth-like high school misfit teen Lisa Swallows, who befriends a reanimated zombie bachelor who died in 1837. Cole Sprouse plays the corpse, who is missing body parts, uses grunts to communicate and resembles Johnny Depp from “Edward Scissorhands.”

Lisa's mother has met a grisly death and she has found herself in a new town with a new family after her dad remarries. Her stepmother (gloriously over-the-top Carla Gugino) hates her and her stepsister (Liza Soberano, hopefully not making a career-ending mistake) is a friendly cheerleader.

The arrival of a Victorian-era zombie into 1989 offers many possibilities but all the interesting ones are avoided as the filmmakers embark on a “Weird Science”-like, “My Fair Lady” reversal — cleaning him up and hiding him in her bedroom.

Director Zelda Williams is simply overmatched here, unable to conjure tension, interest, connection or coherence. “Lisa Frankenstein” lurches from idiocy to whimsy to grossness to ultra-violence, obsessed along the way with grade-school toilet humor, like putting worms in fruit salads.

But the blame needs to be spread around. Written by Diablo Cody — unhappily a million miles now from “Juno” — who has tried, if we use the best possible motive, to write a satire of '80s teen movies, but has made something unwatchable — unfunny, unclever and dull. “Weekend at Bernie’s,” which also dealt with a corpse, looks like a Christopher Nolan film in comparison.

Maybe, like Cody’s previous stab at horror “Jennifer’s Body,” this will become a cult hit one day. But that at least had some fun parts. This is lazy storytelling, like thinking that just showing us a clip of Bob Ross painting is somehow uproariously funny.

Lisa, who by the end of the movie is dressing as Madonna circa “Desperately Seeking Susan,” has embarked on a murderous rampage and is rushing to lose her virginity before it all ends. Will she find love? Will she recognize true love before it's too late? Who cares?

Filmgoers will note with alarm that by the time the credits roll, the sweet, goth-inclined outcast Lisa has evolved into an unhinged, violent, self-involved, murderous monster while the zombie has gone the other way, becoming more human and compassionate. Talk about losing your way.