The Lazarus Effect
My Review: It’s a Frankenstein movie! But not a very good one. There’s more than a little hint of Lucy in this movie (the movie where Scarlett Johanssen gradually gets an increasing percentage of her brain activated and gains psychic powers), including the same silly “we use 10% of our brains” premise.
Oh, so the plot: these scientists are working on a drug that you can inject (along with a jolt of electricity, of course) to reanimate a corpse. They say it’s to give doctors more time to work on somebody before it’s too late, but for some reason they are testing it with days-dead animals instead of killing something and using it immediately, which makes so much more sense, both in general and for the purpose they claim. So of course they manage to bring a dog back to life, and it acts weird and vicious. Then they end up in a situation where one of them dies while they’re in the lab, so they bring her back. She becomes very evil, and starts killing them all with psychic powers, without the slightest indication of what her goal is in doing so, it’s just to be evil.
The ending of this movie (semi-spoilerish?) is an extreme letdown. It’s almost like the story had just barely gotten started. We’ve seen one little encounter with the main characters, but it’s left completely wide open as to what will happen from there. And worse than the open-ended nature of it is the fact that it’s preceded by a climax in which we have a hero figuring stuff out and defeating the evil, and that just gets undone instantly, so it just feels like we completely wasted our time watching it. It’s equivalent to “it was all a dream” which is never fair to the audience. It was really the ending that tanked this movie for me, although at no point was it ever really a good movie. Pretty lame all around. They had some ideas that could’ve gone somewhere, but they did absolutely nothing with them. And didn’t explain anything. At all. It’s truly like it was all just for the action and shock value, there was no story being told to us at all.
My Rating: 1/5 Electronic Cigarettes.
My Movie Idea: Man, I totally had an idea while watching this and forgot it since then. I wish I had written it down. Well, you could do this movie in a non-terrible way: Start with the same situation, inventing the drug, testing it on an animal, then being forced into using it to resurrect a person because it’s not like it can make them any worse. But from there, we slow things
waaay down. Instead of her going on a rampage immediately, she gets checked out, she gets to go home, the whole lab is under all kinds of investigation and they are working very hard to hide the fact that they raised her, as she begins to experience weird symptoms. Mental lapses, tremors. She can’t get any treatment due to the secret cause of the illness.
Then she starts discovering bad things happening during blackouts. She is in her kitchen, chopping some onions, she blinks, and then the wall has words carved into it with the knife stabbed into the end (I don’t know what words, they’d be important though). Also her fridge is open and all the contents have been thrown on the floor. She has knowledge she shouldn’t have, but she can’t remember it, it’s only there during her lapses.
In the end, there’s so many ways this could go. She could be the goodguy or the badguy, there could be entities from “the other side” that only she can see and fight, she could be totally innocent but a psychotic murderer during blackouts, we could run scenes out of sequence or flashback to find that she has actually already killed somebody and didn’t know it until much later, so many possibilities (so many other things we could discover much too late for big twists!). Yeah, if I actually spent some time thinking this out it could be a good movie. Too bad I’m not going to!
