| Kevin Lima, the director of Enchanted and Disney’s Tarzan cartoon, has signed on to direct Fox 2000’s Frank, a romantic comedy with a difference. Oh, we know you hear that all the time, but this time it might actually be true, for Frank is about an anti-social teen prodigy at medical school who, following several failed efforts to make friends, fashions together her own special friend… a reanimated corpse, pieced together from several cadavers. So, as the title suggests, clearly Frank is to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein what Clueless was to Jane Austen’s Emma, or what Michael Bay’s Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen was to Les Miserables. OK, scratch that last one – but Frank seems like it certainly has plenty of potential to be a Mean Girls/Heathers-style skewering of teen society and culture, while piling on a few gruesome giggles for good measure. Certainly, the inference is that our heroine falls in love with her living dead companion, which indicates that Frank may be a good deal darker than Lima's previous Disneyfied output. Frankly (no pun intended, which is rare for us), though, that's a good thing. And a teen update of the classic horror tale seems like a no-brainer (not to mention a no-hearter, no-kidneyer and no-pancreaser). With the remake of Teen Wolf in the works as well, it can only be a matter of time before a studio tackles something like Young Dracula. Lima’s dance card is pretty full at the moment, with Frank joining The Incredible Mr. Limpet, Tom Thumb, and The Spook’s Apprentice on his list of possible projects. But, as Frank has only just gone out to writers, it’s unlikely that he’ll be doing this one next. We’ll keep you posted.
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