Sometimes...Dead is Better

The Lazarus Effect has been out for a few weeks now, and before I go into my review -i’d like to set the stage a bit. Blumhouse Productions once garnered an instant seal of approval from me. If I saw that creepy little girl and floating chair grace the screen before a viewing…I knew I was in for a treat. I never would have imagined that they would grow into what they have become. It seems as if they are all but required if you want your horror release seen by the masses on the silver screen. But as always – with great success, comes great sacrifice. When you are in the business of producing films for the masses..you have to conform to the masses. That’s where The Lazarus Effect comes in.

It should come as no surprise that the film is beautiful. Blumhouse may have become a lot of things, but they aren’t exactly known for releasing films of subpar production value. It’s easy for us here at MH to get caught up in the indie scene. After all, we love it. But it’s nice to see a film with some money behind it from time to time. In case you were wondering, $3-4 million = “money behind it” in the horror industry. Even if we aim high at a $4 million budget, the film has already brought in just shy of $19 million….No wonder Blumhouse is doing so well, eh?

The cast is good, and features several faces that will be familiar to both genre fans and the everyday movie goer. Olivia Wilde, Even Peters, Donald Glover, and Mark Duplass all carry their weight and deliver performances worthy of your time. In case you haven’t noticed, all of my comments up to this point have been rather superficial. Production value, star power, etc. So how does The Lazarus Effect fare as a movie? Well, that’s where is gets tricky.

Original stories are extremely difficult to come up with. Trust me, I know. But The Lazarus Effect plays out more like a remix of several films of the past. We follow a group of researches on a simple mission…to bring the dead back to life. So yeah, INSTANTLY films like Flatliners and Pet Cemetery come to mind. The good thing, is that the film is a PG-13 affair. So it’s likely that the target audience has never seen or heard of the aforementioned films. And while that may be a shame, there is certainly no harm in retelling a story that’s absolutely worth telling. At it’s core, The Lazarus Effect does have a cool story, but boy do things get squirrelly at the end.

No spoilers here, but there comes a time when things take a turn. I do not watch complete trailers of films, so I will say that I was genuinely surprised. After that turn though – things just get sloppy. Story telling seems to get mushed together with multiple concepts, and even that awesome cast I mentioned above seems to get lazy. Remember, we are dealing with dead people, but I’ll goddamned if one of these dead people isn’t CLEARLY breathing. Not like a little “Ah – caught you!” sort of breathing, but a “I just ran a triathlon, and could really use a few moments to catch my breathe” – kind of breathing. It may seem like a silly thing to get hung up on, but I couldn’t stop looking at it. Yeah…it happens more than once. I could even hear others in the theater mention it. It’s just kind of embarrassing for a film with this amount of polish on it.

I suppose it suits the film though. In the end, all of the polish in the world can’t change what The Lazarus Effect is. It’s an attractive film with a promising (yet familiar) storyline. Unfortunately, it’s simply vanilla. If you’ve seem some clips or trailers of the film and thought that you have it pegged…you’re probably right. There isn’t much substance to be had here. It is exactly what you would expect a mass released PG-13 horror film to be – and $19 million dollars worth of people say that’s just fine.