The movie is clearly a homage to Flatliners, but that's not in any way negative. Character building is fairly honest and I enjoyed seeing Evan Peters here as he has a good presence on screen.However for me personally I couldn't help but feel the movie got to that magic moment and decided to back away for a more modest and somewhat safe approach. Had that door been opened this movie could have become so much more.In the end the movie was interesting, and anything that Blumhouse or Jason Blum is involved in tends to be worth a look see for me.

A group of researchers led by Frank and his fiancée Zoe are able to bring back the dead to life in this horror film entitled "The Lazarus Effect".It stars Mark Duplass and Olivia Wilde together with Donald Glover,Evan Peters,Sarah Bolger,Amy Aquino and Ray Wise.Medical researchers Frank and his fiancée, Zoe have developed a serum that is able to assists coma patient.But later,it was revealed that it is actually able to bring the dead back to life. They code- named it as "Lazarus".With the assistance of their friends, Niko, Clay and videographer Eva,they run an experiment with the dog. But later,they try to apply the serum to human when an accident happens during their experiment. Well,it was obviously something that has already been done before.There is nothing new presented in this film.As always,those that are brought back to life whether be it a dog or a human being will always be having some problems in some parts of their body.And you've guessed it, things will definitely be not really successful at the end.

I'm a huge horror fan. This movie gave me chills because it's based on an interesting, yet realistic concept. It touches on the idea that DMT, the most potent hallucinogen on the planet, being naturally occurring in the human brain and found in the pineal gland (which is scientifically true - not just made up for the movie, and why it got my attention), floods the brain during death. Which is where the "white light" idea came from. It is possible to chemically produce DMT, and the team of researchers this film follows used DMT as a premise for an experiment to revive the dead.They explain that since the subject (a dog named Rocky who was put down for having stage 5 cataracts in both eyes) has hyperthyroidism as a side effect of the serum, Rocky should be closely observed as aggression comes with hyperthyroidism. The serum doesn't dissipate in the blood stream as they predicted, and with the electric shocks and increase in the neurological system, Rocky's brain is firing at much higher levels than normal. The Dean of medicine shuts the operation down, for fear of bad publicity from the experiment, as many people are religious and will see this as "Playing God." The team takes this as the pharmaceutical company trying to steal their glory, and decides to duplicate the experiment with video evidence to prove their ownership of the serum. The team sneaks into their lab, and puts everything together to revive another dog. In this process, Zoe (Olivia) forgets to remove her engagement ring, and is electrocuted by it when she attempts to throw the electrical charge to the second subject. The team attempts many times to revive her with adrenaline, paddles and CPR, but she is gone. Feeling responsible for the engagement ring he gave to her, the leading research doctor, Frank, takes a leap of faith and puts Zoe on the table to inject her with the serum. The team is extremely reluctant, they urge Frank that using the serum on a human is not only unethical but extremely risky as they still haven't worked out the issues with Rocky yet. Throwing multiple charges, Zoe awakens, terrified, confused and out of sorts.The question is now on everyone's mind; what will happen? Of course everyone is curious to know, "What was it like?" Zoe is still unsure of what's going on with her revived body, and does not immediately jump to explain... While she sleeps, seeing as DMT is what causes humans to dream, Zoe's dreams are more intense, and her brain waves are extremely strong, as the serum is chock full of DMT, and still present in her system. Zoe now can read thoughts, has telekinesis, clairvoyance, and crazy strength. As this seems far-fetched to the typical scary movie junkie, it's based off the idea that the human brain only uses one lobe at a time. From an MRI, Zoe's brain is using every lobe at once. This movie is based of of rational medical ideas, and if you aren't interested in medicine, you WON'T understand or enjoy the movie. I was very pleasantly surprised by the film, and disappointed to see all of the reviews from people who were probably paying more attention to their cellphones than listening to the important explanations the movie gives. Olivia Wilde is a fantastic actress and I love the story.

If you wanna watch a bunch of lame actors bicker about pseudoscience, boy have I got the movie for you! That's, like, the first 75 minutes. Then, eventually, characters start getting killed off in boring and obvious ways and character motivations stop making sense. The only thing that separates this from shot-on-video junkers of the 80s is that modern digital movies can all achieve a similar, atmospheric gloss. But look past that and there's not much else to see.Our team of scientists consist of two stoner comic relief dudes, two implausibly hot chicks and Mark Duplass as himself. All five of them spend their time explaining to each other every aspect of what they're doing, but ultimately the logic of the film's premise doesn't even hold up. ...Which would be fine if it was just an excuse to throw all kinds of wild, cool stuff in front of the camera. But it's also a tame PG-13, so this isn't even entertaining in a trashy/ schlocky way.The film's idea of a dramatic, frightening image is a smokey hallway. Plot twists are set up (Oh no, the chemical company has been spying on us!) and then just dropped because they never mattered in the first place. The revived dog "going Cujo" is constantly threatened throughout the film, and they keep dragging it around from location to location while dramatically zooming in to close ups of its face, but ultimately it never does anything or has any influence on the outcome of the story at all. The first hour of this movie is like Shakma if the killer monkey never broke free of its cage, and the last half hour is a cheap Carrie knock-off without the heart. It doesn't help that the plot twists they withhold from us through most of the film are all disclosed in the trailer, so as an audience we're just left in the position of waiting for the movie to tell us what we already know so we can finally move on.I won't spoil the ending because I just finished watching this movie under an hour ago and I've already forgotten it. If you hang in there for a while, though, you'll eventually get a Ray Wise cameo. Sure, he's a bit over the top, but at least he knows how to make a character interesting. Too bad he didn't stick around behind the scenes and help the rest of the cast out. I guess they were aiming for more realism... in a movie where people come back from the dead and make furniture levitate. That's The Lazarus Effect!