There are terrible movies that are worth the watch. Interesting failures, campy bombs (intentionally or not), so bad you gotta see it, Liam Neeson movies. The list goes on. Whatever you call them, not all bad movies are “only” bad. Making good movies is really difficult, and just because a film doesn’t achieve its goals does not always mean that audiences should pass it up.
Unfortunately, this is not the case for The Lazarus Effect. This movie represents the worst kind of bad. Uninteresting. Predictable. Boring. A rehash of every horror gimmick of the past decade. The kind of bad that, to be honest, almost doesn’t warrant the energy to dislike. The kind where, after the lights rise everyone in the audience kind of looks around at everyone else with that puzzled “what? Is that it?” look on their face. It’s such a massive misfire that I can hardly work up the desire to tear it down.
But I’ll give it a shot. If you are of the ilk to see every horror movie that has ever been made, the rest of this is for you. Otherwise, skip The Lazarus Effect.
The Lazarus Effect is about a team of doctors, led by Zoe and Frank (played by Olivia Wilde and Mark Duplass), who have discovered the science-based thingy called the Lazarus serum. This milky white substance was created to prolong brain function after death long enough for doctors to do whatever they have to to bring that patient back to life without brain damage. It’s used in the film’s opening scenes (after some necessarily dull exposition) to bring a dog back to life. The dog is not right (it looks at Zoe when she sleeps!) and we know that bringing people back from the dead is in the cards.
Reanimating the dead is, morally speaking, questionable behavior, which the film understands, because Mark Duplass says at one point: “What we’re doing is questionable.” But, you know, science? There is an interesting horror movie to be made about the ethics of reanimation, but that’s been done before. We don’t need to worry about ethics.
Olivia Wilde’s Zoe, by the way, has a recurring hellish nightmare about her past, and she believes in souls even though Mark Duplass’s Frank thinks this is stupid, also because science. So they don’t agree about that which should matter but doesn’t. This is a theme for The Lazarus Effect: every little detail that might have been worth returning to is abandoned completely.
Anyway shortly after the dog is brought to back to life, a pharmaceutical company arrives and they take everything away because money and universities and Big Pharma. This conflict lasts about one minute but then doesn’t matter.
After the doctor duo and their assistants (Evan Peters and Donald Glover) have it all stolen, they decide to recreate their experiment with the only thing they still have: one very large bag of Lazarus serum and the use of the lab and all its equipment. The dog thing fails but in the process Zoe dies of electrocution and Frank is so cut up about it that they fill her brain up with the serum and bingo she’s a zombie-super-demon from Zoe’s personal hell dream set upon terrorizing the remaining doctors in the lab.
That’s what The Lazarus Effect is about, and it may even sound kind of interesting. It isn’t. It’s cliched and unsurprising at every moment. Even the gimmicks-like shooting the documentary footage or using the security camera POVs-amount to nothing other than adding that Paranormal Activity feel. A feel that has been ruined by the SIX PARANORMAL ACTIVITY MOVIES.
The Lazarus Effect is a scrap-heap film, pieced together with the tiny little bits of movie that seem like they work and when you step back and look at the whole, everything is nonsense. There was exactly enough quality footage created to make a successful trailer. They should have stopped there. The best thing about The Lazarus Effect is that its only 80 minutes long.
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