One star. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity, horror violence and mild sensuality
By Derrick Bang
This is what passes for scary these days?
This laughable, ludicrous swill?
Modern audiences are getting very short-changed.
With his suddenly homicidal fiancée prowling the darkened corridors outside their lab, Frank (Mark Duplass) cautions Eva (Sarah Bolger) to stay quiet, while he concocts a silly plan to save the day. |
This flaccid rubbish is bad in so
many ways, one scarcely knows where to begin. Luke Dawson and Jeremy Slater’s irrationally
asinine script? David Gelb’s artless, hammer-handed directing? The cast of
blithering idiots who couldn’t inject credibility into their dialogue if their
lives depended on it?
In fairness, bad line readings
aren’t entirely the fault of the cast; nobody could have made this clumsy
nonsense sound persuasive. That said, the performances also don’t deserve
placement on anybody’s résumé.
At its core, this is just another
sloppy re-tread of the hoary Frankenstein saga, with bioengineered chemicals
taking the place of good ol’ lightning. This, too, is part of the problem;
Dawson and Slater haven’t an original thought between them, and seem content to
blatantly rip off vastly superior predecessors.
And they can’t even do that well.
Frank (Mark Duplass) and his
fiancée Zoe (Olivia Wilde), running a research lab at a fictitious,
Berkeley-based university, are being assisted by graduate students Niko (Donald
Glover) and Clay (Evan Peters). The team recently has hired an undergraduate
videographer, Eva (Sarah Bolger), to record their progress.
(One cliché of bad writing, by
the way, is the affectation of granting people no more than first names:
Nothing calls faster attention to wafer-thin, one-dimensional characters.)
Although Eva’s presence gives Gelb
an excuse to dabble in “found footage”-style video inserts, this affectation —
mercifully — quickly is replaced by Michael Fimognari’s conventional
cinematography. Which, to be fair, is a point in Gelb’s favor.
Anyway...
Frank and Zoe apparently obtained
their original grant to develop a chemical “boost” that would help revive
patients who code on an operating table: something akin to adrenalin or
defibrillation. Somewhere along the way, though, they began attempting to
resurrect deceased animals with their gloppy white formula; they finally
succeed with a dog named Rocky.
Champagne all around.
But Rocky has come back ... ah
... different: warier, stronger and
more aggressive. (Cue strong memories of Stephen King’s vastly superior Pet Sematary ... and I mean the book,
not the lousy 1989 film adaptation.) Clay spouts the pseudo-scientific
gibberish that “explains” this transformation: Thanks to the injected glop, Rocky’s
brain is building massive neural networks, moving well past the usual limits of
his species. Or some such nonsense.
Not sure why that would make him
so violent, but hey, I’m no brain surgeon. (Neither is anybody in this movie.
Obviously.)
This instability notwithstanding,
Frank and Zoe blithely take Rocky home, to “keep an eye on him.” What follows
is a narrative miscalculation so severe — so totally silly — that Gelb loses
whatever hold he had on viewers up to this point. Late that night, Fimognari’s
camera pulls back from a tight close-up on a sleeping Zoe ... to reveal Rocky,
silently hovering over her on the bed.
Gelb may have intended this
reveal to be scary. Based on the snickers and catcalls that erupted from
Wednesday’s preview screening audience, viewers apparently thought that Rocky
had something decidedly naughty in mind. Which wouldn’t have been more random
than anything else endured up to that moment...
I must mention, as a sidebar,
that Zoe has long suffered from a recurring nightmare: a flashback to her
childhood, and something having to do with a smoky hallway, an apartment
building fire, and people trapped behind a locked door. (We do eventually get
the details of this incident, not that said “explanation” is the slightest bit
satisfying.)
Back in the real world, Frank is
summoned by the university president (Amy Aquino), who reads him the riot act
for violating the parameters of his original proposal, and dabbling with Things
That Man Was Not Meant To Know. Moments later, Frank and Zoe’s lab is raided by
a corporate stooge (an uncredited Ray Wise) whose Big Pharma client has just
bought the company that awarded the initial research grant, and therefore now
owns all the results.
And takes everything: chemicals,
hard drives, lab notes. Presumably because Big Pharma is jazzed about the
notion of bringing dead dogs back to life.
(It would appear that Aquino and
Wise, both seasoned actors, visited the set for an hour each ... perhaps in an
attempt to add some cred to this misbegotten turkey. As with everything else,
their efforts failed.)
So, total catastrophe.
Ah, but Zoe has saved one sample
of their precious formula. Determined to re-create their work, apparently to “prove”
that they developed this miracle — hey, don’t look at me; none of this makes any sense — Frank and his team
clandestinely return to their lab that evening. Alas, due to a freak electrical
mishap, Zoe suffers a fatal shock.
You know what’s coming.
Steamrolling everybody else’s
objections, Frank resolutely injects Zoe with the juice, and — hey, presto! —
she comes back ... different. With all
sorts of wonderful new skills: telekinesis, mind-reading and — here’s the
whopper — the ability to put other people into
her dreams. So, naturally, poor Eva immediately gets sucked into that smoke-filled,
fire-laced hallway.
Elsewhere, Zoe starts behaving
very, very badly.
But only PG-13 badly, which also
is a puzzle. Since this film boastfully shares its pedigree with “the producers
of The Purge and Sinister” — both of them laden with nastier, R-rated elements — fans
undoubtedly will expect more of the same here. They’re in for a disappointment;
all the yucko stuff in Lazarus is
quite restrained. So there’s another strike: Even the gore-hounds will dismiss
this puerile nonsense with contempt.
Instead, Gelb seems satisfied
with endless variations of somebody jumping at the camera when flickering
lights wink out and then back on: a minor jolt that might work the first time,
but wears thin rapidly.
As for Gelb’s attempt to milk
terror from the likes of storage lockers and e-cigarettes ... the less said,
the better.
I should note that this is Gelb’s
debut feature, following a series of shorts and documentaries, including 2011’s
quite entertaining Jiro Dreams of Sushi.
I respectfully suggest that Gelb refrain from tackling any more dramatic
projects; he obviously can’t direct actors worth a damn.
The major problem, though, is
that Dawson and Slater haven’t the faintest idea where to take their inane storyline.
Instead, they adopt a kitchen-sink approach, apparently hoping that something will
resonate: a bit of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley here, some Stephen King there,
technobabble seasoning straight out of Star
Trek, and some vague allusions to the torment of the damned in Hell
(perhaps intended to align with the superficial nod to the biblical Lazarus).
I cannot imagine why the five key cast members — all with solid, B-level
careers — signed on for this schlock; there’s no way this script ever could
have seemed a reasonable gamble. Poor Wilde fares the worst, ultimately reduced
to wandering the hallways with jet-black contact lenses and a malevolent grin.
I’ve long insisted that nobody
sets out to make a bad movie: that no matter what the final result, at some
point all concerned must’ve had faith in their efforts. Junk like this may
force me to re-evaluate that belief.
The greatest irony comes from a
bit of third-act dialogue, as the now-malevolent Zoe attempts to demean Eva by
belittling her contribution to the project: “Some people are destined for greatness.
Others just hold the camera.”
One must be careful, with such
lines ... because it’s obvious that Gelb & Co. just held the camera.
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