Originally published on July 9, 2024.

Alright, I know nobody on Earth was waiting for a review of The Lazarus Effect, but it wasted by time so now I get to waste yours. The Lazarus Effect is a horror movie about a group of scientists trying to develop a serum that will can bring back the dead, while their videographer, Eva, documents the process. Dr. Zoe McConnell (Wilde) accidentally dies during an experiment and her fiancé, Dr. Frank Walton (Duplass) immediately hooks her up to the machine to be brought back, despite the serum being untested on humans. It's a premise that's been done to death, and I remember not being impressed by the trailers back when it first came out, but I know that marketing is often crap and a bad trailer can hinder a good movie, so I decided on a whim to give it a watch. The great thing about art in general, and especially with horror and sci-fi, is that even a middling idea can become a great piece of art with the right script, directing, cinematography, editing... basically, even an idea as simple as "seven people trapped on a boat with a murderer" can become a masterpiece like Alien in the right hands. "A dead person gets resurrected and comes back WRONG" has been done to death (no pun intended?) -- even in 2015 when the movie came out -- but I went in with an open mind. I was mostly drawn in by the cast: Olivia Wilde, Mark Duplass, Evan Peters, Donald Glover... hey, these are real actors! And they're good actors! Having such a high-profile cast must count for something, even if the premise is a bit dull. And a resurrection story has a lot of room to ask deep questions about the nature of death and the afterlife, or lack thereof. What does happen after we die? Do we go somewhere? Do we experience anything? And what happens when that natural process is broken for selfish reasons?

The Lazarus Effect is not interested in asking any questions that might elevate its material. No, instead director David Gelb just wants to make a spooky haunted house carnival ride with strobe lights and a Sadako-ripoff monster. I don't know how to really convey this concretely, but the movie itself almost seems annoyed at having to provide an explanation, when Olivia Wilde speeds her way through the line "That's what Hell is! You relive the worst moment of your life over and over again!", which, like-- that's a cool idea! It's also been done countless times, but DO something with that!! "No, fuck you," the movie says. "Enjoy the jump scares and demon screeching, idiot."

There's really not even much of a story to describe here. It's actually alright for the first third or so; they successfully bring back a dead dog, which is a cause for celebration -- but there are some strange side effects. The dog, who was blind and put down in old age, has now lost the cataracts that had completely covered his eyes. He seems young and healthy again, but refuses to eat, and the chemical levels in his brain indicate a potential for heightened aggression. He even creepily stands on Dr. Olivia Wilde's bed while she's sleeping, just watching her while standing stone still. That's creepy, good job movie! Whatcha gonna do next? Oh, nothing? There's a single scene where the dog snaps at Evan Peters and, like... uses telekinesis to pull all the food out of the cupboards? Sure, I guess dogs are messy. Okay. But then they just lock him in his cage and he doesn't do a fucking thing for the rest of the movie, until he breaks out, finds Demon Olivia Wilde, and she kills him off screen with a stupid stock dog yelp sound.

I think writing that last paragraph made me realize exactly why this movie is bad: It's cowardly. A major reason why I never bothered to watch this movie before today was the PG-13 rating. I know that's a bit snobbish, a movie can be good and interesting regardless of its rating, but it usually doesn't bode well for horror, with a few exceptions. In wanting to give it the benefit of the doubt, I assumed maybe the script just wasn't relying on blood and gore to tell its story, and so it didn't require an R rating. Gore Verbinski's The Ring is PG-13 and that movie is still scary as hell (I'll argue it's scarier than Ringu and Ring Kanzenban, but that's an argument for another day). After watching it, though, I think the movie was always intended to be PG-13; a safe, boring horror movie that would be a modest financial success for its producers, of the same fast food mold that Blumhouse movies are cut from. It's a cowardly movie in that it isn't brave enough to show you anything actually scary, ask any deep questions about the nature of death, follow through on any of its side plots, not even brave enough to show a dog do something violent or to kill it on screen. Even the deaths are fucking lame; this movie is such white bread, paint-by-numbers boring nothingness that it even adheres to the ancient trope of the black guy dying first -- after a genuinely baffling and pointless moment where Undead Olivia Wilde tries to seduce him. Like, I get it that Niko had a crush on her (and that's really all it's developed to in the script, a crush), but to have her kiss him with no build-up between them when she was alive, no indication that she even knew he was into her, and no hint as to whether this change in her is because of something that happened to her in Hell, or the serum -- it's just genuinely sloppy writing, it's amateurish. After that, she magic-shoots a vape down Evan Peter's throat and he chokes to death, kills the dog off-screen, crushes Mark Duplass' head, and does a fucking Looney Tunes gag where she makes herself appear to be a fireman come to rescue Eva, only to reveal that "It was me all along!!" and then snaps her neck. Lame lame lame lame lame.

Going back to the subject of wasted plot points, this movie is full of them. I'm counting the dog as one: they could have really built up that dog as an omen of the dangers to come, had it do some creepy undead dog shit -- but they didn't, they just stuck him in a cage for the whole movie. Similarly, there's a scene where the college that's funding their work pulls out because bringing people back from the dead is fucked up, and then a pharmaceutical company (led by a maddeningly wasted Ray Wise) muscles into the lab to confiscate their equipment since they've just bought them out. Oh shit, both of those are compelling seeds of conflict! It is fucked up to bring people back from the dead -- the implications of such an endeavor would shatter the very foundations of human belief systems, possibly irreversibly harming society worldwide! And at the same time, a heartless corporation plotting to take all the research for themselves is frustrating and full of ill portent; Big Pharma can't be trusted at the best of times, but to imagine them controlling a resurrection serum that actually works -- the potential ramifications are staggering! What ever will our characters do to combat these antagonistic forces??? Oh that's right THEY DON'T DO ANYTHING. Believe me when I say that neither of these plot points are ever addressed again. Hey, wouldn't it be really interesting to see Drs. Walton and McConnell fight the university or go behind its back, to continue their dangerous experiments? Wouldn't it be compelling if Walton had to steal the serum, or even McConnell's undead body, back from the pharmaceutical company? Wouldn't that make sense since it's their lives' work and they know it works?? Doesn't that sound like a GOOD STORY??

And what about, y'know, HELL? Zoe ("Zoe" meaning "life" in ancient Greek - bet they felt really clever about that one) says that she spent multiple years reliving the worst moment of her life -- an incident where she accidentally started a fire as a child and killed two of her neighbors -- within the hour of real time before she was brought back. Woah, that's really freaky! Almost sounds like a good horror premise!! There are dozens of movies where the plot is "Hell is where you confront repressed memories of your mistakes", and they're usually not great, but as a person who is fascinated by religious cosmology, I love a story that presents a fresh take on what happens after death, or the nature of Heaven and Hell. This movie is supremely uninterested in those ideas, however; it never even tries to hint at whether Zoe actually went to Hell itself; if she was trapped in a hallucination caused by the flood of DMT released at brain death; or if it's the serum itself, the experimental chemical cocktail, that's fucked up her brain and turned her into an aggressive, telekinetic killer. Any one of those explanations would make for a gripping plot, but we don't get anything of the sort. Instead we get people standing around and screaming with strobe lights flashing and Olivia Wilde doing the FUCKING LAME "chin down, eyes up" nonsense that every ghost and demon does in shit movies.

The ending is just as dumb as the rest of the movie: with all of her former friends and her fiancé dead, Olivia Wilde has them lined up to hook up to the machine and bring them back - presumably to be her boring undead murder army - and the last shot is Duplass lunging at the camera with a scream. Thanks for your ticket money dumbass, now go home. The story is an absolute mess of wasted plot starters, there's absolutely no horror, barebones characterization, and a baffling cast of actually good actors reading this sawdust and milk material. How did they even get all these people to be in this? Was it a court order?

For a better movie about messing with death, go watch Resurrected, a found-footage movie about a disillusioned priest uncovering a Vatican conspiracy; and for a movie that does the "Hell is your own past mistakes" schtick well, I recommend As Above, So Below, another found-footage flick about urban explorers venturing too deep into the Paris catacombs.