Review: ‘The Lazarus Effect’ starts smart, goes full stupid

‘The Lazarus Effect’
Director: David Gelb
Stars: Olivia Wilde, Mark Duplass
Rating: R
2 (out of 5) Globes

A low-budget horror number boasting such unlikely genre actors as Mark Duplass and Donald Glover — not to mention an actually well-used Olivia Wilde — is all but setting itself up for disappointment. Even considering that, it’s almost impressive how dumb and rote “The Lazarus Effect” becomes. In its ghoulish muddle of a second half, the token monster thoughtlessly plows through the cast. The movie is just as thoughtless. It’s actually beneath anonymous hackwork, as most careless studio chillers — say, last year’s “Ouija” — would know better than to kill the black guy first. Where it’s going is even more disappointing because of where it’s been.

Not that it’s been anywhere original. Wilde, Duplass and Glover are among a group of young medical scientists who, like movie scientists since the movies began, are playing with fire. They’ve created a serum that brings back dead animals. Whether its powers extend to humans gets an early run when Wilde’s Zoe is accidentally electrocuted, leaving her grieving fiancee — Duplass’ Frank — to whimsically try it out on her. She appears to be fine, but so, at first, did the dog who was their first guinea pig.

At heart, this is less a spookfest than an exploration of delusion and despair, with Frank throwing caution and logic to the wind to ease his sorrows. (It’s like an unpolitical “Deathdream,” Bob Clark’s 1972 grinder in which a soldier killed in Vietnam returns to his parents’ doorstep as a zombie, and greeted with open arms.) But it doesn’t really have a heart. This concept is quickly abandoned so that Zoe can turn into a mere beastie, picking off cast members one-by-one in not particularly imaginative fashion. Director David Gelb — whose previous film is, and you would never ever ever guess this, the food porn documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” — falls back on boo effects, loud noises and malfunctioning fluorescent lights to show off her wrath. Meanwhile Donald Glover gets treated no better than some forgotten ’80s shlub who got chopped up by Jason or Freddy or even the Ghoulies — just meat for the beast.

What makes this worse is that it squanders what is almost a revelatory performance from Wilde. An actress regularly called on to do far less than she can, she spends most of the second half doing Malcolm McDowell smirk-staring as she prowls after her various prey. But Zoe starts off as a real person, and the first half allows her a personality and some real charisma with Duplass. When she’s brought back, she brings a real sense of fear — someone who’s more unsure than the other characters of how much of herself still exists or is about to be subsumed by a dark side. This is going in a depressingly thoughtless direction, but there’s a good stretch where it seems it won’t be. The fear in the middle section that everything may get very, very, very stupid — which it will, and how — is more terrifying than any of the lame kills.