Olivia Wilde, Mark Duplass, Evan Peters, Donald Glover, Sarah Bolger

David Gelb

A group of scientists are working on a serum that, combined with the right stimuli, can bring someone back from the dead. Their argument for creating this is that it would enable doctors to have a little more time to find a cure for whatever is ailing someone. That is a terrible, terrible idea, and the rationale for the idea is even worse. But here’s the worst part: “The Lazarus Effect” actually has some interesting bits mixed in with all of the stupid ones, and the ending is kind of fantastic. To get there, though, we have to slog through a bunch of home video and security camera footage (this looks like it started life as a found footage movie, which makes sense considering the film’s producers also worked on the “Paranormal Activity” films) and an ungodly number of faulty light fixtures. The only thing it was missing was a cat.

Frank (Mark Duplass), his fiancé Zoe (Olivia Wilde), and their assistants Clay (Evan Peters) and Neko (Donald Glover), are working in a basement lab at a school in Berkeley to perfect their Lazarus serum. They bring in student Eva (Sarah Bolger) to document their work on video. They test the process on a dog, and it works, though the dog doesn’t really act like a dog once alive, and there are numerous medical red flags that suggest the dog could become extremely aggressive at any moment. Soon after their success in resurrecting someone, which is only known to those five, the lab is raided by a pharmaceutical company that, according to the terms of the grant that was funding Frank and Zoe’s research, owns all intellectual property in the event the terms of the grant are broken, which happened once they started testing on animals.

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