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Director: David Gelb
Cast: Mark Duplass, Olivia Wilde, Sarah Bolger, Evan Peters, Donald Glover, Sean T. Krishnan, Amy Aquino, Emily Kelavos
Rating: C-
Films about playing God and bringing the dead back to life are familiar cinematic territory. We have seen it all before in storylines ranging from Frankenstein, Flatliners, and Pet Cemetery to name a few. Just in time for the 2015 spring movie season, director David Gelb is giving us The Lazarus Effect. Will this movie about a group of mad scientists attempting to raise the dead keep audiences on the edge of their seats or wanting to jump out of them and head for the nearest exit?
Frank (Mark Duplass) is an ambitious rogue doctor heading up a group of medical scientists consisting of his Catholic minded fiancee Zoe (Olivia Wilde), pot smoking genius Clay (Evan Peters) and Niko (Donald Glover) whose infatuation with Zoe is no secret. The group is joined by Eva (Sarah Bolger), an awestruck college student who will film and keep a video record of the group’s experiments.
Together the medical researchers have developed a resurrection serum that when paired with a big jolt of lightning (sound familiar, Frankenstein fans?) will bring the dead back to life. The first experiment on a dead pig is a failure. Then they up the dosage on a dog. Just when they think the second resurrection attempt fails, the dog springs to life. Zoe, who worries that they just may have ripped the canine from doggie heaven, questions the morality of their actions, and Clay is convinced (especially after spending a night alone with the pooch) that there is something terribly wrong with their new pet.
The group’s excitement over their research quickly vanishes when the university’s President Dalley (Amy Aquino) and a corporate attorney (Sean T. Krishnan) inform the adventurous bunch that the company funding their project has been sold and the new company is confiscating their research and shutting them down. Frank will have none of that and rounds up his crew to sneak into the lab for one last experiment. In this last experiment things go terribly wrong when Zoe dies after getting electrocuted. Desperate to save the love of his life, Frank makes Zoe the subject of the final dose of the serum. No big surprise – Zoe comes back to life but is not quite the same as before.
At first it just seems like Zoe is in shock but then we discover that she is able to move objects and is quickly developing the ability of telepathy… but that’s not all. Zoe, who has been haunted by dreams of a burning building since childhood, is now going over to the dark side. Her paranoia about her teammates is causing her to terrorize them, and in effort to protect herself she starts to slowly pick them off one by one.
Initially the movie starts with an intelligent and intriguing angle but takes a turn when Zoe goes into her Zombie-like state. Her fellow scientists, that are supposed to be of superior intelligence, wind up looking pretty stupid as they run around the university lab in the dark trying to figure out what Zoe has in store for them. The medical mumbo-jumbo dialogue does nothing to help the characters look like medical geniuses. They just come off sounding like a bunch of idiots spitting out a lot of gibberish.
There are a few attempts at creating some jumpy knuckle biting scenes, but sophisticated horror buffs won’t get anything out of it. As the story unfolds, it is so obvious that The Lazarus Effect steals from other horror thrillers of the past. You see influences from A Nightmare on Elm Street when characters get stuck in a dream sequence. There are dashes taken from films like Firestarter and mostly recently Lucy as we watch our lead character being misunderstood all because of a few supernatural powers. The moral question of whether it is right or wrong to bring someone back from the dead was done much better in Pet Cemetery and Flatliners.
Mark Duplass is able to pull off the nerdy, sloppy, somewhat mad professor in the film. Supporting actors Evan Peters and Donald Glover also hold their own with whatever screen time they’re given. Sarah Bolger nicely portrays the teary eyed damsel in distress with more sense than her new found medical friends. Olivia Wilde does get the best character of all as she goes from an angel to demon. But despite the cast doing a reasonable job on each of their roles, the script is so weak that even a strong ensemble can’t hold this movie together. Plus it’s so disappointing once the big secret causing all the mayhem is revealed, and it is never really made clear if it is Zoe causing all problems or some evil forces that possessed the lady returning from the afterlife. The Lazarus Effect is not a movie meant for the living and should have just remained dead on the cutting room floor.
