THE LAZARUS EFFECT (2015, directed by David Gelb)
Hey kids! Do you want to be a scientist? Just correctly answer the following skill-testing question.
1. You have successfully tested a serum on a dog that brings living creatures back from the dead. Do you:
a) keep the dog in the lab under strict observation, and subject it to rigorous testing to determine possible side effects and gather data for your almost certain Nobel-winning paper; or
b) put it on a leash and take it home because, aww, puppy!
If you answered b), then congratulations! You're on the team!
Yeah, THE LAZARUS EFFECT is that kind of movie.
As set-ups for horror movies go, I suppose you could do worse. Frank (Mark Duplass) and Zoe (Olivia Wilde) are researchers working on a drug that was originally conceived as a way to revive coma patients, but their research has taken them in a slightly more radical direction (and delayed their wedding, which gives Zoe a sad). The group is rounded out by Niko (Donald Glover), the research assistant who's been pining away for Zoe since they were in school together, Clay (Evan Peters, Quicksilver from DAYS OF FUTURE PAST), the research assistant who vapes, and Eva (Sarah Bolger), the journalism student they bring aboard as a videographer so Clay will also have someone to lust after.
Reasonably talented cast, moodily-lit underground lab, personal tensions within the group... the elements are there for a solid, creepily claustrophobic flick. But once that dog jumps back to life, THE LAZARUS EFFECT goes all stupid. Right after their successful test, and after Rocky the dog has loomed ominously over a sleeping Zoe at night to display his spooky foreshadowing powers, Ray Wise and a bunch of corporate goons show up for thirty seconds to seize all their research and set themselves up with cushy gigs as the Umbrella Corporation for any direct-to-DVD sequels. The subplot goes nowhere, but it does compel the group to break back into the lab and re-create their successful test so they can prove to the world that the research was theirs (the goons manage to leave them with exactly the tools they need to do so, including a key card for the lab), only this time they have to perform the test on Zoe instead of another conveniently-left-behind dog corpse because lab accident! And, we're all going to jail anyway, we have nothing to lose! And, we've come this far, we can't stop now!
Zoe, of course, comes back wrong, and it turns out that THE LAZARUS EFFECT is just the evil version of LUCY. Zoe is now using all of her brain instead of a small fraction of it at any given time, and as a result she gets all kinds of freaky powers that are mostly accompanied by exploding light fixtures and her eyes going black. The movie tries to play coy on why she comes back wrong. Maybe she's projecting her Catholic guilt onto everyone else. Maybe she went to Hell and something came back in her place. Whatever. She's evil now, and so the killing commences. Bad science! Naughty science! No supper for you!
The black guy is the first one to die and stay dead, by the way. It's Donald Glover, but he still dies first. Sigh
If you're hoping for any kind of gore quotient, you won't get it. The film tries to get by on suggestion and atmosphere, and even classic psychic monster flicks like SCANNERS or THE FURY had more blood. Once Zoe's rampage begins, deaths are either of the pseudo-ironic variety (there's more than a little Freddy Krueger in our Zoe) or happen in cutaway. In fact, Olivia Wilde's face is probably the best special effect in the whole movie. She does evil surprisingly well. Really, the whole cast makes the best of what little they're given, but it's all but impossible to have any sympathy for a group of people who are all so dumb. THE LAZARUS EFFECT manages to perfectly walk that soggy middle ground between actually scary and entertainingly bad, and there really isn't much to do after the credits roll but count up all the #sciencefail moments. I'd suggest making it a drinking game, but your liver would never forgive me.
There's exactly one thing that can redeem this movie: an increasingly ludicrous set of direct-to-DVD sequels, with evil psychic Lazarus Effect zombies taking over the world, until we get the universes-colliding LAZARUS EFFECT VS LUCY finale of my dreams. Otherwise, forget it.
