← Back to Reviews
in
The Lazarus Effect:
This might be the worst movie that I've ever seen in terms of structure. This movie is too long at 75 minutes, because more than half of it is filler. At the same time, it feels a bit too short. It ended right when it was getting started. Most films have a 3 act structure. There is a beginning, where setup happens, a middle, where the plot happens, and the end, where the payoff happens. Some art films can deviate from this effectively, but this is a Blumhouse movie, so the deviation is not intentional. The issue is that there are 2 first acts and a third act, meaning that no real plot happens. It's more like a series of subplots that get introduced, solved in 10 minutes, and cause another conflict. An extreme spoiler warning is in effect in this area, because I need to delve into everything that happens in order to really discuss this.
The first 25 minutes feel like a first act. A crew of 5 medical scientists is working on a Lazarus serum. They use this serum to revive a dog. Once you finish the film, you realize that this entire first 25 minutes could have been cut out and nothing would change. You would lose a couple of jump scares, but it would be the same film if it was 50 minutes long. It's all exposition leading into the buildup. Then their company gets bought out and they lose all of their work. They have to go back into the lab to replicate that work. This plot line is useless because the 5 of them would have returned to the lab to work on their experiment anyways, and the new company is never mentioned again once they get in the lab. They perform the experiment, and Olivia Wilde dies. In a normal film, this would probably be the end of the first act. The second act has the team work to revive her and live with her and realize that she's acting different, as well as resolve some previous subplots, like the buyout or the dog that was experimented on in the beginning. As I said earlier, neither of these things are mentioned or hold relevance after they happen, making the whole thing filler. The third act in this theoretical movie would show Wilde's full treatment from the serum take effect as she plays slasher. Because of the enormous amount of padding prior, that whole process must be fit into 25 minutes. Wilde is brought back to life, acts weird, and goes around killing off the other scientists, while showing her hell, a world where she relives the worst day of her life over and over again. It makes for a really boring beginning and middle and an end too quick to feel anything. The start being boring isn't helped by the trailer and poster showing that undead Olivia Wilde is the villain of the movie. You're basically spending time waiting for her to become undead so things can start happening. Once she becomes undead, there's less than half an hour left, and so a lot of things just don't happen.
That's a lot of story to fit into an hour and 15 minutes. I could be impressed that they pulled it off at at, but it comes at the cost of any humanity it may have had. Not a single character in the film has more than 1 dimension, and Sarah Bolger's new recruit Eva probably has less than that. The story is paced horribly and nonsensical, but that could have been forgiven if I cared about the fate of any of these characters. I don't. In spite of this, the performances are fine. Olivia Wilde was surprisingly okay, and the other four characters are TV actors that give the type of performance that makes you say "it was good for the script they had to work with" instead of being outright good. The above flaws could have also sort of been forgiven if the movie was at least good horror without being a good film, but there's no time to really build any kind of tension or atmosphere in any scene, so every single scary thing is a jump scare.
Other than that third act, where they try to cram 60 minutes worth of story into 25, this didn't feel much like a horror movie at all. There will be things like the dog jolting to life or Donald Glover playing a prank with a mask that get jump scare music, but there's nothing to be afraid of until there's a psychotic zombie killing people. I don't like relying on jump scares in any capacity. I think that the score can be very effective in building tension leading up to a real scare, or that it can accentuate a real scare, but a sound in itself cannot be the scare, and having that sound accompany a random thing popping out at the screen does not make it any scarier. You might succeed in making me jump, especially if I'm watching with headphones on my laptop like I did with this, but you will almost never succeed in scaring me. As much as I don't like jump scares, what I really don't like are false jump scares, when the visual pop is just a friend doing something stupid instead of something that I'm supposed to be afraid of. At the very least, a jump scare where the villain jumps out (Which happens twice in this film) could be built on later (Which doesn't happen at all, invalidating that point, but criticism should be constructive and there's a way this could have been saved).
The Lazarus Effect isn't a horrible film, but it is really boring. It drags way more than a 75 minute run time has any right to. There are no good scares and no interesting characters. While there wasn't anything really bad in it, it is a bad movie because it lacks any good. That puts it a notch above other recent Blumhouse horror movies like The Gallows, but that's kind of like saying that I would rather eat food from my floor than from my trash can. Unless you find predictable jump scares especially frightening, there is really no reason to watch this film.
The Lazarus Effect:
This might be the worst movie that I've ever seen in terms of structure. This movie is too long at 75 minutes, because more than half of it is filler. At the same time, it feels a bit too short. It ended right when it was getting started. Most films have a 3 act structure. There is a beginning, where setup happens, a middle, where the plot happens, and the end, where the payoff happens. Some art films can deviate from this effectively, but this is a Blumhouse movie, so the deviation is not intentional. The issue is that there are 2 first acts and a third act, meaning that no real plot happens. It's more like a series of subplots that get introduced, solved in 10 minutes, and cause another conflict. An extreme spoiler warning is in effect in this area, because I need to delve into everything that happens in order to really discuss this.
The first 25 minutes feel like a first act. A crew of 5 medical scientists is working on a Lazarus serum. They use this serum to revive a dog. Once you finish the film, you realize that this entire first 25 minutes could have been cut out and nothing would change. You would lose a couple of jump scares, but it would be the same film if it was 50 minutes long. It's all exposition leading into the buildup. Then their company gets bought out and they lose all of their work. They have to go back into the lab to replicate that work. This plot line is useless because the 5 of them would have returned to the lab to work on their experiment anyways, and the new company is never mentioned again once they get in the lab. They perform the experiment, and Olivia Wilde dies. In a normal film, this would probably be the end of the first act. The second act has the team work to revive her and live with her and realize that she's acting different, as well as resolve some previous subplots, like the buyout or the dog that was experimented on in the beginning. As I said earlier, neither of these things are mentioned or hold relevance after they happen, making the whole thing filler. The third act in this theoretical movie would show Wilde's full treatment from the serum take effect as she plays slasher. Because of the enormous amount of padding prior, that whole process must be fit into 25 minutes. Wilde is brought back to life, acts weird, and goes around killing off the other scientists, while showing her hell, a world where she relives the worst day of her life over and over again. It makes for a really boring beginning and middle and an end too quick to feel anything. The start being boring isn't helped by the trailer and poster showing that undead Olivia Wilde is the villain of the movie. You're basically spending time waiting for her to become undead so things can start happening. Once she becomes undead, there's less than half an hour left, and so a lot of things just don't happen.
That's a lot of story to fit into an hour and 15 minutes. I could be impressed that they pulled it off at at, but it comes at the cost of any humanity it may have had. Not a single character in the film has more than 1 dimension, and Sarah Bolger's new recruit Eva probably has less than that. The story is paced horribly and nonsensical, but that could have been forgiven if I cared about the fate of any of these characters. I don't. In spite of this, the performances are fine. Olivia Wilde was surprisingly okay, and the other four characters are TV actors that give the type of performance that makes you say "it was good for the script they had to work with" instead of being outright good. The above flaws could have also sort of been forgiven if the movie was at least good horror without being a good film, but there's no time to really build any kind of tension or atmosphere in any scene, so every single scary thing is a jump scare.
Other than that third act, where they try to cram 60 minutes worth of story into 25, this didn't feel much like a horror movie at all. There will be things like the dog jolting to life or Donald Glover playing a prank with a mask that get jump scare music, but there's nothing to be afraid of until there's a psychotic zombie killing people. I don't like relying on jump scares in any capacity. I think that the score can be very effective in building tension leading up to a real scare, or that it can accentuate a real scare, but a sound in itself cannot be the scare, and having that sound accompany a random thing popping out at the screen does not make it any scarier. You might succeed in making me jump, especially if I'm watching with headphones on my laptop like I did with this, but you will almost never succeed in scaring me. As much as I don't like jump scares, what I really don't like are false jump scares, when the visual pop is just a friend doing something stupid instead of something that I'm supposed to be afraid of. At the very least, a jump scare where the villain jumps out (Which happens twice in this film) could be built on later (Which doesn't happen at all, invalidating that point, but criticism should be constructive and there's a way this could have been saved).
The Lazarus Effect isn't a horrible film, but it is really boring. It drags way more than a 75 minute run time has any right to. There are no good scares and no interesting characters. While there wasn't anything really bad in it, it is a bad movie because it lacks any good. That puts it a notch above other recent Blumhouse horror movies like The Gallows, but that's kind of like saying that I would rather eat food from my floor than from my trash can. Unless you find predictable jump scares especially frightening, there is really no reason to watch this film.