The Boy Next Door

By John Mulderig, Catholic News Service

NEW YORK (CNS) – As a vehicle for its star, Jennifer Lopez, “The Boy Next Door” (Universal) is basically a garbage truck.

Although it succeeds in parading her flesh – and that of her male counterpart, “Step Up”-series veteran Ryan Guzman – director Rob Cohen’s trashy thriller is eye-rollingly inept on every other score.

Lopez plays high school English teacher Claire Peterson. While separated from her unfaithful husband Garrett (John Corbett), Claire finds her lonely world steamed up by the arrival of a new neighbour, hunky teen Noah Sandborn (Guzman).

Showing Claire no mercy from the start, Noah not only works on her car engine wearing a James Dean-style T-shirt, he also changes with the curtains open. Well, after all, just how much can a strait-laced but mildly voyeuristic gal be expected to stand?

So – after a pause only long enough to allow Noah to mention the reassuring fact that he’s 19 and therefore of age – it’s off to bed with both of them.

Gosh darn the luck, though, Noah turns out to be an obsessive maniac who can’t tell the difference between an middle-aged educator’s summertime indiscretion and true love. Sound like a gender-switching variation on the premise of the 1987 hit “Fatal Attraction?” It is.

Unfortunately for Claire, her ill-chosen paramour has managed to befriend her bullied son, Kevin (Ian Nelson), thus putting the whole family in danger. And, to make things worse, despite being so well-stricken in years, Noah is also on track to join Claire’s class as a transfer student once school starts up again, thereby putting her career in jeopardy as well.

As irresolute Claire dithers, merry prankster Noah gets right to the point, bedecking her classroom with an endless series of photos showing the two of them in flagrante. The sight of Claire’s frantic efforts to clear away this incriminating evidence while her increasingly impatient charges wait outside is as laughable as many other moments in the pulpy proceedings.

The film contains some harsh violence with brief but extreme gore, strong sexual content, including graphic adultery and other immoral acts, a couple of profanities and frequent rough and crude language. The Catholic News Service classification is O – morally offensive. The Motion Picture Association of America rating is R – restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.

The Lazarus Effect

By Kurt Jensen, Catholic News Service

NEW YORK (CNS) – There’s not much new explained about the hazards of tampering with nature in the second-rate horror exercise “The Lazarus Effect” (Relativity).

There’s also little that’s frightening.

Assisted by plucky videographer Eva (Sarah Bolger), four intrepid young medical researchers – Frank (Mark Duplass), his fiancé, Zoe (Olivia Wilde), Clay (Evan Peters) and Niko (Donald Glover) – have been developing a treatment to restore neural functions in coma patients. Their “Lazarus formula” combines serum injections with electrical shocks.

As the film opens, the quartet have already gotten carried away with the implications of their work, and are busily attempting to jolt life into dead animals.

They score a twofer by restoring a dog to the land of the living while also curing his cataracts. No one, in the manner of Colin Clive’s Henry Frankenstein, announces, “It’s alive!” Instead, Clay reflects, “This might work!”

The pooch isn’t overjoyed with his jumper-cable “resurrection.” The resulting overload of brain chemicals gets every single synapse clicking along so well that hallucinations – and, inconveniently, telekinesis – result.

Even attributed to a canine Carrie, this remains the most boring power in all of horror filmdom, since making lab equipment fly around will never rise above a cheap special effect.

How much longer until these overgrown Doogie Howsers try to revive a person? Not long.

Opportunity knocks when Zoe is accidentally electrocuted during the attempt to revive another dog. Frank quickly rigs her up to the equipment, only to be startled when she bolts back into action.

Like the dog before her, Zoe 2.0 isn’t quite right, and is soon chasing her pals around the lab while dealing with the childhood trauma of having started a fatal fire. The fright factor consists of Zoe popping out of the shadows when she’s not reading minds or skittering down hallways.

Before her revivification, Zoe is revealed to be nominally Catholic. This means she reflects on her mortal soul after Frank teases her, “Two glasses of wine and the inner Catholic girl comes out.”

As limned by director David Gelb and screenwriters Luke Dawson and Jeremy Slater, Zoe’s bargain-basement theological exposition has little enough to do with the actual faith. She regards hell, for instance, as a personal creation in which one keeps repeating a painful moment from life.

For better or worse, though, such musings zoom past before the movie gets down to the genuine business at hand – to wit, an unconvincing portrayal of mayhem and death.

The film contains frequent action violence, some sexual banter and fleeting profanity and crude language. The Catholic News Service classification is A-III – adults. The Motion Picture Association of America rating is PG-13 – parents strongly cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.