The Lazarus Effect (USA, 2015)

Nine Things About the Movie The Lazarus Effect

1. Wow, this movie is dumb.

2.  It's about a group of college students working on a serum to help coma patients. For some reason they use it to resurrect a dead dog. Things go wrong for the group, and of course they have to try the serum on one of their own members.

3. The first ten minutes are kind of intriguing. But once a couple of the college students bring the undead dog home with them, you can stop watching. You've seen the best part of the movie.

4. The film uses a lot of pseudo-scientific vocabulary words in quick conversations, to cover up the fact that what they are saying makes no sense whatsoever. It even uses the stupid "we only use 10% of our brain" myth, and I don't know why. It's not like the movie makes more sense by utilizing that concept.

5. I suspect the script was written a couple of stoned college freshmen, who threw in a bunch of random, disconnected ideas that they thought were cool and "deep". I can't even really explain what the movie was doing. It goes from being "scientific" to demonic with the flip of a switch.

6. This is one of the bigger movie roles so far for Donald Glover (aka Childish Gambino). He's probably the best actor in the movie. I felt bad for him; he deserves better than this.

7. There are some interesting individual scenes and surreal moments. This could have been a decent movie, if somebody connected with the film actually knew what they were doing.

8. You know how in slasher movies, when the killer is chasing the people and they always make dumb decisions? This movie is like that, except the people make dumb decisions for the whole movie, whether somebody is chasing them or not.

9. As a movie belonging to the "re-animation" subgenre of horror, I think this movie should have stayed dead.