Butler's Cinema Scene

Kristen Vaganos, Carmen Anello

“I AM LISA”  My rating: C+

92 minutes | No MPAA rating

Horror fans — who seem to be perennially on the prowl for new twists on old tropes — will find fresh meat to chew on in “I Am Lisa,” the latest from Lawrence-based creepmeister Patrick Rea.

Working from a screenplay by first-timer Eric Winkler (full disclosure: Eric and I were for years colleagues at the Kansas City Star), “…Lisa” offers a mashup of two genres — the female revenge melodrama (“I Spit on Your Grave,” etc.) and the werewolf picture.

Moreover, it’s a female centric yarn — the cast is mostly women.

The Lisa of the title (Kristen Vaganos) operates a small-town bookstore.  She’s got scholarly glasses and hides beneath a stocking cap (think Dustin Hoffman in “Straw Dogs”) and  is easy prey for a posse of bad girls who seem to run things in the little burg.

Their sneering, manipulative leader is Jessica (Carmen Anello), who makes off with an expensive first edition.  Lisa seeks relief from the local sheriff, Deb Huckins (Manon Halliburton).

Big mistake.  Sheriff Huckins is Jessica’s mom (uh…how did this escape Lisa?) and the head of a crime family that runs everything from drugs to prostitution.  Her thick son Nick (Crhis Bylsma) is her deputy.

For her troubles Lisa will be kicked nearly to death, raped and, at one point, crucified.  Left to expire in the woods, she’s bitten by a wolf and wakes up in the rural home of an eccentric occultist (Cinnamon Schultz) who nurses her back to health.  This doesn’t take as long as you’d expect…all of a sudden Lisa is exhibiting remarkable recuperative properties.

Hiding out with her best bud Sam (Jennifer Seward), who will function as a last-act maiden-in-distress, Lisa realizes that she’s becoming a powerful beast capable of snapping a neck or tearing out a throat.

Mean girls had best look out.

The picture has been nicely shot by Hanuman Brown-Eagle, and the makeup department has gone minimalist, eschewing the hairy Wolf Man look  for a rather more restrained rendering: long fingernails, prominent canines and yellowish goatish eyes.

Manon Halliburton

“I Am Lisa” falters in that it’s hard to know if we’re meant to take this seriously or as a big goof. Most of the film is played straight (too straight, given the silliness of the premise and lack of psychological realism). But then there are moments of deliberate humor (Lisa mesmerized by an array of fresh meat at the local grocery).

And Halliburton’s sheriff — a female riff on the hundreds of corrupt good-ol’-boy lawmen we’ve seen in movies over the years — is entertainingly over the top if too fiendishly sadistic for comfort.

There are moments, in fact, when “I Am Lisa” flirts with camp, though in the end it cannot commit.

| Robert W. Butler