The Lazarus Effect has an intriguing premise and an impressive cast, but it    unfortunately ventures into typical horror clichés and silly storytelling.

There are countless movies, television shows, and books that deal with the topic of resurrection. The topic itself seems to be dead as there hasn’t been a memorable resurrection tale, outside of The Walking Dead and World War Z, in quite some time. The Lazarus Effect seems like it wants to revive the topic in its first act, but for some reason completely fails to do anything with the promising set up.        

The Lazarus Effect is interesting because it takes a simplistic concept, what if you could bring back something from the dead, and adds some cool intrigue by making one of the protagonists someone that gets resurrected. This had the makings of a great horror movie, and while it is certainly far from terrible, The Lazarus Effect instead takes its potentially great horror concept and grinds it through every horror cliché imaginable. The result is a typical PG-13 horror flick that ends up being unscary, uninteresting, and ultimately unsatisfying.

The film follows a group of medical students who discover a way to bring dead things back to life. When one of the scientists dies in an accident, the group hesitantly decides to bring that person back from the dead. Instead of going for a creepy and moody atmosphere that the early stages of the film sets up, The Lazarus Effect instead nose dives into a string of over the top and predictable horror beats.     

What The Lazarus Effect lacks in the story department it certainly makes up for in its cast. There might not be so called “A-listers” but with a cast of Mark Duplass, Olivia Wilde, Sarah Bolger, Evan Peters and Donald Glover, one can expect some decent performances. The whole cast delivers and really helps get through some of the sillier plot elements.

Duplass and Wilde especially sell some of the film’s more crucial scenes. It is normally easy to pick on a horror movie’s over the top acting, but the two leads do a nice job of selling the characters to the audience.

The supporting cast also does a nice job, especially Peters and Glover. The characters themselves might be horror clichés, but the two are really effective in both the comic relief and scary moments. The two of them have a lot of noteworthy television experience, especially Peters who stars in American Horror Story, and they definitely deliver some of the film’s more memorable parts.

Outside of the film’s strong first act, the cast is not given anything interesting to do for the rest of the movie. Once the film hits its second act, everything becomes cliché and mostly predictable. Instead of going for a smart and compelling story arc, the film turns into a supernatural fright fest that has been done a hundred times before.

The scares are few and far between during the film’s quick 83 minute runtime. The filmmakers rely on jump scares which quickly get annoying, and not to mention predictable. It’s frustrating to watch because the film goes for the cheap scares rather than sticking to its promising set up.

Overall, The Lazarus Effect is somewhat better than most of the other PG-13 horror flicks that flood the cinema nowadays, which is not saying much. The intriguing set up and impressive cast are put to waste thanks to run of the mill horror storytelling and ineffective scares. The Lazarus Effect might show some signs of life, but only a rewrite of the film’s final two acts could bring this back from the dead.

GRADE: C+