By LINDSI HEBERT, Staff Reporter.
Directed by David Gelb and released to theaters 2015, The Lazarus Effect is basically what happens when you let college medical students play around in a biohazard lab. Using a special serum that is supposed to bring creatures back from the dead, researchers Frank (Mark Duplass) and Zoe (Olivia Wilde) work together with students Eva (Sarah Bolger), Clay (Evan Peters), and Niko (Donald Glover). Their trials start slow with testing on a dead pig, and eventually moves up to a dead dog.
The test on the dead dog is a huge success, with the dog’s brain firing on all cylinders. Then things start to go wrong. Clay starts to notice the dog behaving strangely, it doesn’t want to play or eat or even sleep. It’s also getting incredibly aggressive. Some sort of big corporation’s discovered that the college students are basically playing god and they want them to stop for reasons that really aren’t explained all that well.
As a result, the corporation closed down the research lab, but does that stop our student heroes and researchers Frank and Zoe? Nope! Like the vigilante science nerds they are, the group and their zombie rage dog sneaks back into the lab to begin their experiments once again. They start off with testing another dog, but the serum needs a large electric jolt to get things flowing. In order to do that, some poor soul has to pull a giant lever that’s straight out of the movie Frankenstein.
Zoe is the one who pulls, but because their lab is apparently made completely out of metals and she doesn’t ground herself, she gets electrocuted. Panicked because they just saw one of their friends die in a place that is now off limits, they use the serum to bring her back. Surprisingly enough, it works, but like with the dog, there are some major…problems.
The Lazarus Effect really tries to be a horror movie. It’s all jump scares and build up. That being said, I jumped more in this movie than I did when I saw Annabelle. The scares were timed well, even if they were cheap. The main problem is that the plot didn’t really make a lot of sense.
As hard as I tried, I could not find out what exactly the evil corporation was or what they were doing. They went into no details whatsoever about that, or about what the serum was doing to people outside of opening some weird hell portal.
It was confusing because of this lack of information, and I’m pretty sure that if the writer just thought it through a little more, they would have had something great. Unfortunately, they didn’t, and this is what happened.
Credit where credit is due, though, and The Lazarus Effect does deserve props for having some really cool visual effects. About halfway through, when all hell breaks loose, things are looking spooky. They also look great, the graphics were really awesome and instead of taking away from the story, they added to the creepiness of the film. I didn’t know what was going on, but I sure as hell was creeped out by it. Honestly, the scariest things are what we don’t understand, right? Right?
Though I did not run in terror at the very sight of the movie, I actually enjoyed watching it. The acting was pretty good and Olivia Wilde’s character certainly got really creepy. I just wish that it showed her humanity slipping away in a more gradual process, and the entire event felt really rushed and confined. If they’d opened up the set to include the entire college campus instead of one laboratory and a spooky hallway, and made the move two hours long to account for the extra explaining that has to happen, it would have been good.
On a scale of one to five gummy bears, with five being the highest, The Lazarus Effect rises from the dead with two bears. Spooky, but not explained.
