Feb. 28, 2015 | 0 Comments
REVIEW BY BURL BURLINGAME / Special to the Star-Advertiser
All of the actors here are perfectly capable folks, given the right material and direction. Here, they have neither, and if nothing else, The Lazarus Effect makes you acutely aware that actors can be victims too.
Its basic Frankenstein/Re-Animator/Flatliners/Mad Scientist shtick. A group of rather cute scientific researchers find a formula that can bring the recently dead back to life. They try it on a dead dog. Dog comes back back to life and acts weird. Actually, it acts like a cat. Then one of the scientists becomes recently dead herself and they try it out on a human, who then acts weird, but not in a good way.
The undead dog, behaving like a cat, absolutely disappears when things get weird. Good doggie.
The science stuff in the beginning unfolds rather well, even if the university lab theyre working in is underlit like a bargain-basement haunted house. What, the university cant afford light bulbs? Its when the action gets going with the undead human being that the film goes kerblooie. Theres more to horror films than black screens, flying furniture and boo! moments. They require imagination and verve, as well as a subversive sense of humor.
The undead scientist is played by lovely Olivia Wilde. At least I formerly thought she was lovely. She gets so many extreme close-ups that you feel like her dermatologist. She winds up looking like those outer-space pictures of dead moons. Gives one the creeps, like nothing else in the movie does. Poor Olivia.
The other actors, all of whom are seasoned pros, such as Mark Duplass, Evan Peters, Sarah Bolger and particularly Donald Glover, do science-yak one minute, scream the next minute, and are squished or zapped or burnt alive a minute later. (Interestingly, none are scared to death.) The entire Lazarus is only 83 minutes, and I want 80 of those minutes back.
Even the silliest of scare movies can have a sense of fun and danger, but The Lazarus Effect implodes only a third of the way in, and never recovers. Its better to let dead dogs lie.
Source: http://www.honolulupulse.com/2015/02/review-the-lazarus-effect/
