At least, that’s what Frank hopes to achieve by hooking up various deceased animals, including a pig and a dog, to an elaborate machine and injecting them with a fancy resuscitation serum. When the ongoing trials actually succeed in reanimating a departed canine, Frank is thrilled. Still, even a modest opening weekend will ensure a profit before toxic word of mouth kills this stinker for good.Īs a follow-up to the heralded foodie documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” this is certainly an odd selection for director David Gelb at the very least, it’s the strangest doc-to-horror left turn since Joe Berlinger’s “Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2.” But as with that notorious disappointment, the offbeat choice of helmer isn’t reflected in the anonymous final product (though “Lazarus” leading lady Olivia Wilde does nosh on sushi in one early scene).įor reasons never made entirely clear, romantically entangled scientific researchers Frank ( Mark Duplass) and Zoe (Wilde) have spent several years at a California university getting closer and closer to their ultimate goal: resurrecting the dead. Completed back in 2013 and originally set for release via Lionsgate, the low-budget pic subsequently landed at Relativity, which just last year teamed with producing shingle Blumhouse to distribute the imaginative and unsettling “Oculus.” No such luck this time around, as “Lazarus” shamelessly steals from superior genre efforts and lacks any distinguishing traits beyond a wildly overqualified cast. If only for that fleeting moment, it actually finds a pulse.Appropriately enough for a horror-thriller about raising the dead, “ The Lazarus Effect” has spent the past few years sitting on a shelf, developing quite a stench in the process. 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.
#The lazarus effect cast plus#
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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