Lisa Frankenstein Rotten Tomatoes Score Is Out

Lisa Frankenstein is heading to theaters this weekend, just in time for Valentine’s Day! The new horror rom-com stars Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania‘s Kathryn Newton as an unpopular high schooler in the 1980s who accidentally re-animates a Victorian corpse played by Riverdale‘s Cole Sprouse. Written by Diablo Cody (Juno, Jennifer’s Body) and directed by Zelda Williams, Lisa Frankenstein is officially up on Rotten Tomatoes. At the time of this writing, the movie has been met with mixed reviews, earning a 52% critics score after 44 reviews. You can check out some quotes from critics below… 

“These teens may be a bit messy (who isn’t?) but it’s a joy to have Diablo Cody back to telegraph a new kind of adolescent horror, with a smile full of teeth,” Ella Kemp (Empire Magazine) praised.

“Lisa Frankenstein is a charming curiosity, but falls far short of greatness,” Kevin Fox Jr. (Paste Magazine) wrote.

“Lisa Frankenstein sets out to tell a modern love story in an 80s horror comedy riff, but though it’s freaky fun, it’s not all that romantic,” Molly Freeman (Screen Rant) shared.

“Scenes have no shape to them, the world feels half-built, and the reality that supposedly holds them together is too erratic for Williams to establish any kind of emotional baseline,” David Ehrlich (IndieWire) explained.

“Williams and Cody definitely nailed the stitched-together-from-spare-parts aspect of the Frankenstein mythos, to be sure. The reanimation of such material is another matter entirely,” David Fear (Rolling Stone) added.

“Lisa Frankenstein is the weird girl sleepover staple for a new generation,” BJ Colangelo (/Film) declared.

“This film could have easily come out in 1989 and been heralded amongst its contemporaries, but we’re lucky enough to have the 2024 version, performed by a very game cast who deliver what is likely to be one of the funniest films of the year,” Leigh Monson (AV Club) wrote.

What Inspired Lisa Frankenstein?

“For me, I’m glad that you said John Hughes because Weird Science was definitely up there,” Cody told ComicBook.com‘s Chris Killian after he used Hughes as an inspiration example. “I loved that movie when I was a kid, and I also was always intrigued by the idea of, ‘What if it was the girl creating the perfect man?’ Just kind of flipping the narrative on that one a little bit. But yeah, I’m a total Hughes-head, so that was definitely up there for me.”

“It’s a bit of a tie, because I will say I’m such a John Waters stan that there’s a lot of that in here,” Williams added. “But I really did take a lot of the things that I genuinely feel inspired by from Death Becomes Her. That movie, for me, is so informative of comedy when you’re dealing with violence, especially in this ’80s setting, and the color and the vibrancy. Death Becomes Her was incredibly informative for me.”

Lisa Frankenstein is due in theaters on February 9th.