Review of The Lazarus Effect (2015) by Will B — 21 Jul 2016

So this was an awful movie. If you saw the trailer you pretty much can guess exactly what happens in the movie; a group of scientists is are making a super serum that raises people from the dead and they kill someone by accident and they have to resurrect them and they get trapped with a zombie demon. And it slowly digresses into your classic survival film.

And when I say slowly I mean slowly, they try their best to develop the characters in the beginning and there's some half assed banter between a few of them but it's pretty fuckin flat to be honest.

Oh but if you think this part of the movie was boring and contrived just you wait! I swear to god the drama in this film is just abysmal, it's like watching your parents argue. All the chemistry that they kinda had before just vanishes and any lingering strands of character get left behind.

There's a scene where this resurrected dog is watching this woman sleep. She's laying in bed asleep and the dog is standing on the bed over her, just watching... and it's the funniest scene in the whole movie. They've got the scary music playing and everything but the dog just looks like he wants to be let out to use the restroom.

But wait a minute, after all the good things you've heard you'd think that the action would be pretty good right? Well kinda. The first real piece of action is actually pretty cool. The demon zombie picks up a guy with her mind and throws him in a locker and squishes it with him inside it. But sadly this theme could not go on. For some reason they decided it would be more interesting "cough! Cheaper" to start an action scene and then just cut to black and show the results. For example: there's a scene where the zombie demon picks up a bunch of chairs and desks and stuff with her mind, ready to hurtle them at our boring protagonists. Then the screen goes black for a few seconds, we get a nice "chairs falling on the floor" noise and the lights come back on, ta da!!! All the shit is on the floor! I totally didn't wanna see that scene, thanks David!

One thing that could have been really interesting but was completely fucked by the writer was the whole heaven, death, religion aspect. I personally love it when a film dips into a little philosophy. And this was an easy target, you could talk about all that fun death stuff. But no, leave it to this fucking movie to suck the fun out of it. Every time they talk about it it's always "I think this is true" "No you're lying" -that's an exact quote.

Oh yeah and by the way fuck the camera girl; she had like 4 lines in the whole movie and absolutely no character. I thought at first that she would be the one who got lazarized but nope, she continued her inexplicable existence to the very end. Thanks for surprising me.

Over all this movie is exactly what you'd expect. The characters and flat, the plot is predictable, the horror is just a black screen and there will probably be a sequel for some reason. Goodnight.