RELEASED LISA FRANKENSTEIN

UK 15/ROI 15, 94 mins

Available now on digital platforms, and available from June 3 on DVD/Blu-ray.

Starring: Kathryn Newton, Cole Sprouse, Liza Soberano, Joe Chrest, Carla Gugino, Jennifer Pierce Mathus.

Socially awkward teenager Lisa Swallows (Kathryn Newton) slowly emerges from traumatic mutism after witnessing the death of her mother (Jennifer Pierce Mathus) by the blade of a masked maniac. Six months after this devastating loss, her father Dale (Joe Chrest) marries a cruel, self-obsessed nurse named Janet (Carla Gugino), who already has a perky cheerleader daughter named Taffy (Liza Soberano) from a previous relationship.

Consumed by morbid thoughts, Lisa visits her favourite headstone in the local cemetery and whispers her desire to join the dead: “I wish I could be with you”

That night, a bolt of green lightning strikes the grave and reanimates a Victorian man (Cole Sprouse), whose zombified form develops a deep romantic attachment to the teenager.

Lisa Frankenstein is a bloodthirsty horror comedy set in 1989, which marks the feature directorial debut of Zelda Williams, daughter of master improviser Robin Williams.

A disorienting mish-mash of genres -– slasher, coming-ofage comedy, Gothic horror, romance, ghoulish crime caper – is loosely stitched together, rather like the zombified paramour and his “acquired” fresh body parts.

Diablo Cody’s script trades in darkly humorously oneliners (“You don’t have to worry about anything because your mum has already been murdered”) and the outlandish bloodletting elicits some of the biggest laughs.

Sprouse exercises his physical comedy muscles as the monstrous suitor, who looks strikingly similar to Johnny Depp’s Sweeney Todd when wielding an axe.

Newton channels Desperately Seeking Susan-era Madonna for her Goth-lite attire. A palpable absence of screen chemistry between the pair leaves the film with one severed foot perpetually in the grave.