I Am Lisa (2020) – A Movie A Day 2021 #26

I recently discovered that the last video rental store in my area finally closed for good, and that made me a little sad. Yes, there are quicker and easier ways to rent movies these days than by going into an actual store and looking at actual boxes with actual discs inside, but I actually really enjoy doing that. I’m sure my love of video stores is based in large part on nostalgia, and I’m fine with that. I get a sense of comfort and familiarity whenever I’m walking down aisles and aisles of video boxes. But for now, it seems that’s all over. And sure, I hadn’t been to my local video store in nearly a year thanks to the pandemic, and I’m sure the pandemic was the final blow that shut the store’s doors, but still. I already miss it. So without a video store to go to, I decided to browse a local Redbox for my daily movie. The experience is nowhere close to the same thing as a video store, but I did walk away with a disc in my hand, so that’s nice.

Anyway. The reason I told that brief and sad story is because part of the experience of going to the video store for me includes picking up movies I might otherwise never choose to watch. When I was in the habit, I would go and check out one or two of the newly-released, low budget horror movies every single week. The experience is different than looking for something to rent online because the selection is going to be much more limited, and I don’t have the benefit of immediately watching a trailer to help me choose (I could use my phone to do that, but I consider that cheating). To pick a movie I would only have the box art and the movie’s brief writeup. I’ve found some gems doing that, and I’ve also found some things that are very much not gems. Using Redbox ends up giving me similar limitations in choice, so my resulting movie picks will also be similarly blind. For today, I ended up picking a movie titled I Am Lisa because of its neat cover art and its promise of a revenge movie with werewolves. It’s a fun concept, but I think the filmmakers tried to make a movie that was a bit too far beyond their means.

I Am Lisa is about a young woman, Lisa, who returns to her hometown after her grandmother passes away. The town is small enough to have a police force consisting of only the mother/son duo of Sheriff Deb and Deputy Nick. The sheriff’s daughter, Jessica, is the town bully/drug dealer, and Sheriff Deb supports her daughter in an utterly corrupt and criminal way. So when Lisa reluctantly attempts to tell the sheriff about Jessica threatening and assaulting her one day, Sheriff Deb allows Jessica, her friends, and Deputy Nick to beat Lisa nearly to death before leaving her in the woods for the local wolves to eat. If you’re thinking that things escalate quickly in I Am Lisa, you’d be right. The sheriff and her family are almost cartoonish in how despicable they are.

As you might assume, the wolves to not end up eating Lisa, but one of them does bite her. After recovering and making it to her best friend’s house without the sheriff or anyone else realizing she is still alive, Lisa discovers some changes about herself. For one thing, she heals very quickly. Also, she seems to be craving dog food and raw meat when she was previously a vegetarian. It turns out Lisa might be turning into a werewolf, and she’s having trouble controlling her anger about her attempted murder. What follows is a revenge story that spirals out of Lisa’s control as the sheriff begins to suspect what is happening.

All of that sounds pretty good, right? It does to me, and I did enjoy I Am Lisa in a lot of ways. The characterizations can be somewhat extreme in comical ways such as the sheriff who is vile and evil for no apparent reason and the deputy who firebombs a store in the middle of shopping center in broad daylight. That makes things very black-and-white as far as who to cheer for, and that makes it a light and fun movie. There is also a fair amount of comedy throughout the movie with some fun scenes like Lisa learning more about werewolves by watching movies or Lisa snacking on dog treats while shopping for raw meat. There might also be some unintended comedy with some of the reactions the characters give in certain situations. For example, Lisa’s best friend Sam is very casual and unaffected when Lisa tells her that she just murdered someone in a werewolf rage. Sam just kind of shrugs it off and goes on with her day. Maybe the comedy there was intended, but I don’t think I Am Lisa is really supposed to be that funny of a movie. I could be wrong though, and that kind of ties in to the shortcomings of the film.

Some elements of the movie don’t come across very well either through gaps in the script or by a lack of means to effectively pull off some of the action in scenes. I’m not really talking about plot holes when I say “gaps,” but there are some things that just kind of come out of nowhere or have very little in the way of context. For instance, there’s a character named Dolphus who lives in the woods, and even though we barely see him throughout the movie, he’s meant to be a main threat in the climactic scene. Who is he? I’m not sure. I mean, I know what he’s doing and I know why he is physically present in the climax, but what purpose does he serve other than to be an added threat? What are his relations to any of the other characters? I don’t know. Maybe I missed something, but yeah, I just don’t know.

Plot gaps I can shrug off just fine. So Dolphus is there. So what? It’s fine. The real issue in I Am Lisa is the action. I understand that it’s a very low budget movie, and I’m never going to be the kind of person who dismisses a movie because of the budget, but I think they needed a bit more money to execute some of the scenes they wanted. Money or ingenuity, one of the two.

I Am Lisa is described as a werewolf movie with bloody revenge, but even the simplest actions end up being shot around rather than shown. Here are a few examples. Early in the movie Lisa is driving down a road at night. What’s supposed to happen is a wolf walks out into the middle of the road and stops, and that forces Lisa to slam on the brakes as the wolf stares at her before slowly walking away. What we see though, is Lisa in what looks like a stationary car reacting to something in a shocked manner. We then cut to a tight closeup on a wolf somewhere. Then we cut back to a medium shot of Lisa in the car. It looks like Lisa and the wolf are worlds apart. This same sort of thing happens any time a real wolf is supposed to be in a scene. When Lisa gets bitten by a wolf, we only know this because Lisa says so and we see the aftermath of the bite. I don’t think we see the bite happening, and I don’t think we ever even see Lisa and the wolf in the same shot.

One more pretty egregious example is when the deputy throws a Molotov cocktail through a store window like I mentioned earlier. Deputy Nick is with his sister Jessica, and we stay focused on the two of them in a medium shot as Jessica lights the Molotov and Nick throws it off screen. We hear a sound effect of glass breaking, but we don’t cut back to see the result. We stay focused on Nick and Jessica the whole time. We do see the store burning a few minutes later, but it’s at night in the rain with only a few seconds of some okay CGI flames.

I get it, working around a budget can be difficult, especially when you have big ideas. But to me, I feel like working within the limitations you have can lead to some fantastic ingenuity and some unintended greatness when you do it right. Like, maybe ditch the firebomb scene and try to do something you can actually show to get the same result in the story. If you don’t have the budget for a wolf wrangler or a trained animal you can use with actors, maybe ditch the scene with the actual bite and show a dream sequence with flashes of wolves which is supposed to be Lisa’s dreams when she passed out from the time she was beaten up to the time she wakes up in bed. There are ways around all of it, and some of those ways can create the same or even better effects within the movie.

I don’t want to bash I Am Lisa though, because I did enjoy it for the most part. There were some good and cheesy blood effects later in the movie, and the relationship between Lisa and her best friend Sam was very entertaining. The plot is a basic revenge movie plot, and that’s something I usually enjoy. So yeah, there was a lot to like throughout the movie. If you want to see a full werewolf transformation though, you’re going to be disappointed. Again, a full fur suit for Lisa probably wasn’t in the budget, but she had some neat eye effects and her nails got real sharp. She also looked like a vampire from Buffy the Vampire Slayer by the end of the movie (with a furrowed brow makeup effect). Overall, I had fun with I Am Lisa.