What happens when you die? Where do you go? Are you stuck in a nightmare?

This is the concept The Lazarus effects delves into, not so effectively.

A team of four scientists are working in a lab, under a grant, to work on a serum to assist coma patients, but end up using to bring back the dead to life. Experimenting on a dog, who they manage to bring back to life successfully, they realize that there are some after effects to. Frank is told by the Dean that their project is shut down because they violated the code. Frank, his fiance Zoe, along with Clay, Niko and Eva, decide to quickly repeat and capture their experiment to prove everyone wrong. during the secret experiment, Zoe is fatally electrocuted and dies.While Zoe was dead, she is seen encountering her oft-repeated nightmare where she is standing in a burning corridor, with people trapped inside the room at the end. Frank becomes extremely upset at the death of his fiancee, and so proposes to revive her using the “Lazarus” serum. While the rest of the group initially oppose the idea, they fall help Frank.

Zoe is ultimately brought back to life, but she is not all that human. Due to an increased neural brain activity, she develops superhuman powers (a supernatural X Men), which the rest of the team try to tackle. An evil malevolent force begins to develop inside Zoe who seeks to kill everyone, including her own fiance.

This is one of those movies, which has a realistic sense of fear and dread, and in the hands of perhaps a better director, could have turned into a great movie. What lets it down is insipid characters, run of the mill shocks and scares and a lot of recycling of ideas, most obvious one from Frankenstein.

A Pet Sematary meets The Shining with a little bit of Lucy thrown in, The Lazarus Effect is a movie with an awesome concept let down by weak script and predictable storyline.

My search to find a solid horror movie is still on…

2 out of 5