The Horror Show
The Lazarus Effect
by David Gelb
Another theatrical release seems to have fallen short with me. With as much as I could wish upon a star to love The Lazarus Effect, I guess I have run out of stars.
This movie had all the right ingredients: Olivia Wilde, Mark Duplass, Donald Glover, Evan Peters, and the concept of bringing the dead back to life via scientific experimentation. That sounds so perfect, does it not? However what the movie did was miss its mark.
You have a team of med students led by Frank and Zoe (Duplass and Wilde) who have come up with “The Lazarus Serum” and successfully brought a dead dog back to life. They celebrate, they’re excited, and then to their dismay, they’re shut down by big pharma. They get kicked out of the lab and have all their data stolen when their secret experimentation is found out. In one last ditch effort to reproduce the experiment’s results and ensure they receive credit for their hard work, they break back into the lab and in a horrible turn of events, Zoe is electrocuted. Frank refuses to accept that his fiancée has died and forces the others to use The Lazarus Serum on Zoe.
If you haven’t seen the trailer and have no idea what this movie is about, then stop reading this review because you’re going to get some spoilers past this point.
The serum works on Zoe and our team has now not only brought a dead dog back to life, but have brought back a human being from the other side. Zoe immediately begins to act strange and a whole ridiculous slew of supernatural and telekinetic things start happening. It’s brought to our attention that perhaps Zoe’s soul was in the process of crossing over to the other side and bringing her back has resulted in her soul being trapped in hell.
So let me stop talking about the storyline because that’s about as good as it gets and it’s pretty much all downhill from there. Now I’ll talk about why seeing this movie in theaters will be a waste of your time and money. (Spoilers)
The entire rest of the film after they bring Zoe back takes place over the course of one night. If they had stuck with the scientific aspect of this movie and blended more with horror it would have been great, but they decided to bring in questionable morals, sins of the main character’s past, and religion. There were way too many elements and deeper meanings that failed in the overall storytelling process and honestly, if this had just been a mindless horror film I would have appreciated it much more. Hell, if it were an all-out science fiction flick I would have loved it. But The Lazarus Effect relied on far too many jump scares, loud sounds, and creepy lighting. The film should have taken course over a few days and the events should have occurred in a different environment. We have already seen what “evil corporations” can do when they get their hands on something and we’ve already seen people trying to escape a lab (hint hint, Resident Evil). We didn’t need another film where the dead were brought back to life secretly in a medical facility. It’s been done before and they missed an opportunity to explore more of what Zoe was going through instead of just turning her into a monster.
The end sets us up for a possible sequel, which if they make it, of course I’m going to see it because I have, like I said at the beginning of this review, stars I want to wish upon to make me love this movie. It had a lot of potential but overall fell flat and blew a great concept.
Stevie Kopas, HMS
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