![]() The Lazarus Effect, unlike the burning apartment building of Zoe's nightmares, presents any number of potentially intriguing narrative paths. The group has been testing its "Lazarus serum" for four years before achieving success (with a dead dog that ends up the most effective cast member), and mostly in the dangerously underlit laboratories that are the home of all horror movie scientists. The doctors' indiscretion can be blamed on any number of factors. Only in the case of The Lazarus Effect, Zoe doesn't want to make amends so much as kill every living thing. In Flatliners, the med students - another difference: Frank (Mark Duplass) and Zoe (Olivia Wilde) are actual doctors, who should presumably know better - relive the horrible things they did when younger. In all seriousness, it's kind of weird how in all these movies, the experience of getting brought back from the dead brings to the forefront childhood trauma. Only *one* person is brought back from the dead in The Lazarus Effect. ![]() To these deluded know-it-alls, I would merely point out three things:ġ. "Critical" Analysis: Some people are going to go on and on about how similar (some would say "slavishly imitative of") The Lazarus Effect is to 1990's Flatliners. Not So Brief Plot Synopsis: Science science science "Lazarus serum" science science science "temporal lobe" science science "lipid barrier" science science science "WHAT HAVE WE DONE?" Rating Using Random Objects Relevant To The Film: One Nothing Like the Sun albumout of five.īrief Plot Synopsis: "Did you wreck the car?" If only for that fleeting moment, it actually finds a pulse.Sum Up The Movie Using Other Movies: Pet Semetary plus Flatliners divided by Paranormal Activity The hope for anything remotely surprising or suspenseful dies a bit more with each new power outage, and despite a climax heavy on digitally enhanced mayhem, the film never earns a more honest creep-out than Wilde’s otherworldly allure warping on a dime as accusations begin to fly. With the characters now confined to their lighting-averse lab (in keeping with Blumhouse’s business model of churning out low-budget, location-limited genre offerings), Lazarus settles into a ho-hum slasher groove, offering up with Pavlovian regularity epileptic freak-outs and shadowy figures.Īn above-average cast for this kind of jolt-heavy fare tries to bring some welcome emotional dimension to the proceedings, but they can only do so much with dialogue heavily steeped in either medical jargon, metaphysical nonsense, or futile pleas for mercy. science, the threat of corporate espionage, the still-smoldering remnants of a romance between Niko and Zoe – only for them to go entirely abandoned in the face of Zoe’s subsequent transformation into a telekinetic she-devil eager to pick off her colleagues one by one with PG-13-worthy restraint. Stepping far afield of 2012’s acclaimed Jiro Dreams of Sushi, director David Gelb spends much of the film’s first half establishing a number of competing agendas – the dilemma of faith vs. Along with Clay (Peters), Niko (Glover), and Eva (Bolger), these two aren’t about to let an abrupt corporate takeover interfere with their research, and once Zoe takes a fatal shock at the controls, Frank decides it’s high time to move ahead with human trials. Our crew of intrepid, attractive med students are led by the long-engaged Frank (Duplass) and Zoe (Wilde), who have set aside their wedding vows in the initial pursuit of a serum that could prolong life in coma patients and, as it turns out, restore life to the recently deceased. Considerably less remarkable is The Lazarus Effect, a Frankensteinian combination of Flatliners, Carrie, and just about any possession flick that comes to mind. On the plus side, we have her novel to thank for Michael Crichton’s entire oeuvre. ![]() For the past two centuries, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has cast a rightfully long shadow over all other cautionary tales about the perils of playing God.
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