I Am Lisa: Mean girls discover karma is a howling b--tch in this low-rent/low-expectations lycanthropic revenge tale

By Jim Slotek

Rating: C+

Female revenge films are all the literal rage this season, with the Oscar-bound Promising Young Woman leading the pack. So why not un-bottle some of that rage on the well-worn werewolf genre?

I Am Lisa is a no-frills Mean Girls take on lycanthropy, with a dose of stereotypical small-town hicks-and-corruption, wielded for no other reason than to offer us cardboard characters who deserve killing in the worst way.

It’s also at the low end of low budgets, with dollar-store claws and fangs. This is not a deal-breaker in horror these days. No one has been scared by a CGI ghost or demon in at least a decade. Meanwhile, Blumhouse has made many people jump out of their seats just by having doors open by themselves.

Kristen Vaganos is a tormented bookworm who discovers her lupine side and gets revenge.

But if you’re going that route, the onus is on storytelling, writing and acting. I Am Lisa doesn’t check all the boxes, and exhibits, shall we say, an innocence of style. The writing is sometimes clunky, the story doesn’t always make sense, and, considering the course of events, the actors often don’t react in recognizably human ways.

In the pantheon of movies about teen-girl werewolves, the bar remains set high by the 2000 Canadian indie classic Ginger Snaps.

Still, there is some verve and nerve to a revenge story ignited by a spurned same-sex teen kiss.

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

Lisa (Kristen Vaganos) is a bookish (we know because she wears glasses) recent lit grad who came back to her hell-hole of a hometown after her late grandmother bequeathed her used book store to her.

This is the kind of place where, to paraphrase the late Bill Hicks, you can be immersed in a book in a diner and the waitress might ask, “What are you reading for?”

And it makes her a target for the school bully Jessica (Carmen Anello), who steals valued first editions with impunity and makes forceful sexual advances. 

Why Lisa would return to such a hateful place, even for the chance to run her own business,  is one mystery. Another is why she would take a complaint about Jessica to the local sheriff (Manon Halliburton, somewhat of a younger doppelganger for Frances McDormand), who happens to be the offender’s psychopathic mom (and whose deputy, her son, runs a human trafficking ring with her blessing). 

There are a lot of rabbit holes I Am Lisa doesn’t bother going down in its 90 minutes of screen time – including why Sheriff Huckins would keep a werewolf named Dolphus (Shawn Eric Jones) in the woods more or less on her payroll.

But Dolphus’s woods are where people who cross the sheriff and her psycho brood end up. And, after being dumped to her presumed death, Lisa has the more-or-less good luck to survive her werewolf encounter.

I Am Lisa is one of those werewolf movies, like the 1994 Jack Nicholson movie Wolf, where what happens under the next full moon is not the point. It’s more of a tables-turned thing as her newfound lupine nature asserts itself. 

And that’s really the mission of I Am Lisa. People do horrible things to our heroine. And once empowered, she does horrible things back. Rinse, repeat. 

And unlike, say, last week’s arty, Canadian-made rape revenge horror Violation, I am Lisa is kind of demure in its violent depictions, as if we were watching the cut edited for the cast’s parents.

I Am Lisa. Directed by Patrick Rea, written by Eric Winkler. Starring Kristen Vaganos, Manon Halliburton, Carmen Anello. Available on VOD March 23.