In the late 1980s, there was a little boom in stories about disaffected teens falling in love with the outre and the dangerous, exemplified by films like Heathers and Edward Scissorhands. Those successes would eventually give way to the teen horror epoch of the later 1990s, which would in turn cede ground to the teeny-bop era—and on and on until we landed on the bright antics of YouTubers and their ilk. Long gone are the freak movie kids, the ones who courted or even embraced moral hazard. They were lost to poptimism and performative geekiness and the showy solipsism of TikTok.

It seems the writer Diablo Cody wants them back. She surely had old Winona Ryder on her mind when she wrote Lisa Frankenstein (in theaters February 9), as did director Zelda Williams when she made the film. Lisa Frankenstein—which concerns a tragic and lonely teenager, Lisa (Kathryn Newton), who falls in love with an undead boy—is a steadfast throwback to the worlds of Tim Burton and Daniel Waters (who wrote Heathers), its vivid colors archly offset by the darkness of its story. The pastiche works on occasion, but the film mostly shrinks in the shadow of that which it’s imitating.

Set in some town somewhere (though quite identifiably filmed in Louisiana), Lisa Frankenstein brings us to 1989. Most of the kids at Lisa’s new school (her mother was murdered and her dad quickly remarried and relocated the family) are of the upbeat preppy variety, keenly attuned to the top 40 culture of their times. Lisa is decidedly an outlier (she likes The Cure and has a crush on the editor of the student lit mag) and is thus presumably reflective of the film’s intended audience. This one’s for the weirdos, Lisa Frankenstein proudly asserts, a nasty little tale for the misunderstood and marginalized.

Which is a hoary trope for a reason: it’s an effective way to get viewers on your side. To the film’s credit, though, Lisa Frankenstein does a lot to alienate even those most susceptible to its appeal. It’s a gross movie, a squelch of reeking bodily fluid and severed limbs and creepy crawly bugs. The film asks that we, too, fall in love with Lisa’s monster, the magically revived corpse of a lovelorn young man who died hundreds of years ago. As played by Cole Sprouse, the creature is a lurching ghoul, hideously awkward in his own body. If you had a crush on the alien in the Edgar suit from Men in Black, then this guy will work a treat on you. Everyone else will want the film to hurry up and get to the miraculous makeover.

Or they’ll crush instead on the lit mag boy, played with “I just got signed by Ford Models” swagger by Henry Eikenberry. Or they might, as I did, spend much of the movie wishing it instead focused on Lisa’s stepsister, the sweet and chipper Taffy (Liza Soberano), a pert foil for all of Lisa’s increasingly mannered quirk. Cody does a good job of rounding out a stock character’s dimensions—Taffy has a tartness, an edge that makes her more fully human than she might be in a lesser writer’s hands. Or in a lesser actor’s. Soberano, a star in her native Philippines making her Stateside debut, is an ace scene stealer.

Taffy is one of the film’s chief pleasures, as is an underused Carla Gugino as Lisa’s wicked stepmother, an anal retentive narcissist who loathes her new daughter’s messy intrusion. When Soberano and Gugino are humming away, we get a glimpse of a tighter, cleverer film. But alas, much of Lisa Frankenstein is aimless, a fun enough concept staged with no real sense of purpose. Lisa is an increasingly illegible character, eventually becoming a mere mannequin for a fetching array of Desperately Seeking Susan-esque costumery. (Perhaps the Madonna fixation is understandable: Cody wrote at least one draft of the singer’s intended biopic, which now seems unlikely to be made.)

Williams, making her second feature, goes hard on the film’s visuals, but her garishly lit, soundstage-y world only dimly evokes the sinister whimsy of Tim Burton. (Or, I guess, that of Lisa Frank.) The film’s pacing and volume are off; things play strangely muted and offhanded, even when axes are flying and various body parts are being severed and then sewn on to someone else. Lisa Frankenstein never gets its blood up, essentially playing as a casual mood piece rather than full-bodied horror or romance or comedy.

Part of the problem might be that while Heathers had the menacing charisma of Christian Slater and Edward Scissorhands had the otherworldly magnetism of a then-interesting Johnny Depp, Lisa Frankenstein asks us to believe that its hero is equally enthralled by a grunting corpse that doesn’t do much of anything. The movie doesn’t even seem all that invested in its own condition, as if it too is a bored and jaded teen, trudging through routine. It’s fitting that no one in the film ever exclaims “It’s alive!,” as Lisa Frankenstein itself barely is.