The very concept of this movie 'The Lazarus
Effect' is batshit stupid, and the movie itself never veers
away from this stupidity… actually embraces it I believe… and
for that we admire this movie. Own it, we always say,
and 'The Lazarus Effect' owns it until the bitter end.
Dr. Zoe McConnell (Olivia Wilde) and her fiancé Dr.
Frank Walton (Mark Duplass), along with their crew of techs
and grad assistants have been perfecting this rather awesome
technology which will bring dead things back to life.
Does this sound like a technology that needs to be
developed? We're going to say 'no' to that one.
The Doctors inform me that bringing back the dead is a good
thing, giving people a real second chance and it will change
medicine forever. Like the polio cure or
something. Again, I'm not seeing that, but perhaps I
just lack vision.
Also along for this nutty ride is Niko the… heck, I don't what
Niko's purpose is. He looks at monitors and says stuff,
but I think more importantly Niko is played by Donald Glover,
which means he's Black, which means he's more than likely the
first one to go. Then we have Clay as played by actor
Evan Peters who also looks at monitors and says stuff, but Mr.
Peters has a singular acting style which some may call
intensely annoying… not me, but some… and he amps this style
of his up to the level of eleven in this film. Finally
we have Eva, the grad assistant who owns a video camera, and
thus will be filming stuff. This allows our doctors to
speak into the camera and carefully explain every single
stupid thing they are going to do.
Time to test this life regeneration tech on a dead dog named
Rocky. Yay! It works! And these loons are
actually celebrating this! Better still, our doctors in
love take the dog that's been dead a couple of weeks home as
some kind of a pet. See what we're talking about here?
Of course all is not well with Rocky, it's
doggie brain firing off on all cylinders as well as increased
aggression, but whatever… it works. Circumstance leads
to our crew having to perform another emergency procedure on
yet another dead dog, but if you've seen the trailer, you know
it goes wonky and Dr. Zoe ends up dead. That's terribly
sad and all, and life should go on, but alas Dr. Frank can't
imagine life without his lady love and he convinces his team
to inject her brain with Lazarus White Goo.
Yay! Zoe's not dead no more! But unfortunately,
wherever Zoe went when she died, she came back with super
brain powers… and the Cra Cra. Remember how Darth Vader
could choke you out with his brain? Zoe can do that, and
whole bunch more with her new brain, and I think she's going
to choke out the entire planet Earth, if she makes it out of
this laboratory alive. They need to stop that from
happening. Probably without the help of the Black
guy..
Even though I had heard that this movie 'The Lazarus Effect'
was just awful, I would hesitate saying all of that, plus
there are some good things to like about this movie. For
starters this is a movie that probably has a cast way better
than it deserves, and I think I can honestly say that I caught
no members of this cast sleepwalking through their
performance. Even Ray Wise managed to characteristically
chew up the one scene he was in, just like we'd expect Ray to
do. Another thing that's nice about this movie is that
it's really economical. It's super short, with less than
80 minutes of actual movie running time, meaning it won't
waste too much of your time, and the bulk of this movie takes
place in largely one location. A bunch of high school
kids with a mini-DV camcorder could literally make a fairly
faithful shot for shot remake of this film in like two
afternoons.
But here are the issues. As a horror movie, there
aren't a lot of scares going on, and while it does fare a
little better as a thriller, but not by much. Sure, the
launching point of bringing dead things back to life is super
dumb, but once you get past that the movie does raise some
interesting concepts, almost none of which they chose develop
in any meaningful way as the filmmakers looked to be in a rush
to have Ms. Wilde look weird, then freak out and murder her
work mates. And lastly, every single character in this
movie is retarded. After they bring back the dead dog,
which was plenty stupid but at least in line with what the
movie was about, nothing that anybody did after that point was
even semi-logical. Calling some doctors, calling the
authorities, exiting the building to safety… all off the
table. Just sit around, freak out and wait for Zoe to
kill you. Not a sound plan, I don't think.
'The Lazarus Effect' probably doesn't rate all the hate it
garnered upon its initial release, but even still, it's not
very good either.
