Filmmaker David Gelb has doesn’t seem like the most likely candidate for a low budget horror. Previously his work has mostly been in the documentary realm, whether putting the camera on rock band The Hold Steady ("A Positive Rage"), chronicling the making of Fernando Meirelles‘ "Blindness" ("Vision Of Blindness"), or taking audiences into the realm of one of the food world’s culinary masters ("Jiro Dreams Of Sushi"). But here he is, ready to bring scares with a starry cast in "The Lazarus Effect," and the first trailer has arrived.
Starring Olivia Wilde, Mark Duplass, Evan Peters, and Donald Glover, the story follows a research team who accidentally kill a colleague during their experiments in mapping the brain. When they reanimate her, well, they don’t get what they bargained for. “The reason I love to do low-budget movies is you can try different things… have creative freedom and experiment, like our characters,” producer Jason Blum tells EW, and before you can say "Flatliners," he acknowledges the 1990 flick starring Julia Roberts and Kiefer Sutherland.
“All of us really liked that movie,” Blum admits. “I feel like we’re tipping our hat to ‘Flatliners,’ for sure, in this movie.”
"The Lazarus Effect" opens on February 27th, and yes, Blum is open to doing a sequel if it’s a hit, because, obviously. Watch below.
"The goal here is simple. To bring someone back from the dead."
Yeah, real simple.
"Tipping our hat" sure is an adorable way of saying "ripping off." And it\’s more like Pet Sematary than Flatliners, but then again Tarantino likes to "tip his hat" to a lot of different movies for profit too. They\’re just going to flat out take a scene from Matrix and hope no one noticed? Seriously? Or is that some hat tipping too? Hopefully this film tanks as horribly as it looks. And thanks for showing me how Glover dies, that saves me a lot of restless nights wondering.