POPCORN FRIGHTS 2024: LIZZIE LAZARUS

Stories often romanticize gravediggers. Both people who do it as a profession and the act of digging a grave itself. Most of that is William Shakespeare’s fault — everyone reads or sees Hamlet and suddenly wants to write wisecracking gravediggers into their own stories. Still, it’s a badass horror trope, and I’m always game for a movie about two people working together to bury a corpse.

In Lizzie Lazarus, our corpse-hauling buddies are Bethany (Lianne O’Shea) and Eli (Omar Maskati), two twenty-somethings out to resurrect their friend, Lizzie (Megan Oesterreich), on the summer solstice. It’s one of the titles premiering at Popcorn Frights Film Festival 2024. The festival, which hosts in-person events in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, as well as virtual screenings of films both new and old, is in its 10th year.

The Ballad Of The Gravediggers

The body theft has already happened when Lizzie Lazarus begins. After an unforgettable title sequence, in which Lizzie literally stares at the camera and sings as she lays dead and broken in a creek, we’re off to the woods with Bethany and Eli, dragging her corpse in a body bag across the wilderness to a mysterious resurrection site.

Those familiar with low-budget horror movies know what that premise means. It means about 90 minutes of two actors wandering around the woods talking. Lizzie Lazarus at least knows what banal no-budget indie movie it’s setting up, so it tries to fill its runtime with entertaining dialogue and unpredictable character dynamics. That musical opening scene might be the highlight of the movie — Lizzie Lazarus shortly thereafter plummets downhill and never recovers — but at least the characters’ ever-evolving dynamic is engaging. I could predict 30 minutes into the film where things were headed, but the ending sequence was still well-directed and kept me on my toes, and the final twist was some good spooky fun.

That’s about as much as I can praise Lizzie Lazarus, though. I love no-budget thrillers and horror films. Skinamarink is one of the finest horror films of the last 10 years, and I love other micro-budget titles like Shaky Shivers and Host. I even banged the drum for Brightwood, another movie made for five dollars and a dream where two actors run around the woods for 90 minutes. So it brings me no joy to say that Lizzie Lazarus is bleak, bad, and boring.

The Title Is So Great, Shame About The Film

Writer-director Aviv Rubinstien’s script confuses stuff with substance, filling the gaps between the opening and end credits with one inane, meandering, thematically rambling patch of dialogue after another. Bethany and Eli talk about everything, from aliens to Jimmy Carter to suicide to psych experiments. None of it is relevant to the plot, and barely any of it colors how we see these characters, either. Bethany is a smug, self-righteous liberal arts major who thinks she’s better than everybody else because she can do more political posturing than a Karl Marx action figure. Eli is emotionally frail and hotheaded — the only thing he’s completely sure about is that he loved Lizzie, but as the film continues, we learn that he really didn’t know her at all, and the woman he’s in love with is a version of her that he made up because he’s desperate and horny. Both of these people at least feel real — I went to a liberal arts school, I know these people. But I wouldn’t want to have to drag a body through the woods with them.

The actors aren’t really to blame. They’re miscast and poorly written, but O’Shea and Maskati are trying hard to make bad material work. Maskati is a real catch for Lizzie Lazarus, as the actor previously starred in Amazon’s Evil Eye alongside Sunita Mani and Sarita Choudhury, as well as in Better Call Saul, Good Sam, and Netflix’s Unbelievable. He brings a big-eyed naïveté to Eli, a star-gazing idealism that implies more than the crummy dialogue can ever tell us. O’Shea is an interesting performer too — she’s practically micro-budget horror royalty, having appeared in 2 Die For, A Taste of Phobia, Clickbait, The Once and Future Smash, and Alam: Kingdom of Plants, some of which are also directed and written by Rubenstein. They’re not classics or anything, but they’re the kind of movies that you’d find yourself watching on Tubi while sitting on your couch at 3 in the morning. She sells the swings her character goes through in Lizzie Lazarus, always giving the sense that Bethany knows a little more than she’s letting on. O’Shea and Maskati work well together — I felt like they were maybe 10 years too old for these parts, but I’m happy with them as Lizzie Lazarus’ gravediggers. It’s a shame about the script, because these actors could do something really special had they been given likable, empathetic characters instead of these irritating personalities and leaden backstories.

Insufferable characters aside, the film is languidly paced and poorly staged. It’s got enough material for maybe a good 10-minute short film; at 90 minutes, it’s interminable. Much of that runtime is spent with the characters slowly walking between trees carrying their dead friend. It looks really cheap, too — the scenery doesn’t move behind the actors as they walk, and when the camera’s not moving, either, it’s so obvious that they’re just walking in place. At least we know they filmed in the actual woods at night — if I were the camera operator, I wouldn’t want to risk twisting my ankle on a root and breaking a camera either. But for goodness sake, get an assistant cameraperson to guide the operator. The budget gets in Lizzie Lazarus’ way on numerous occasions, especially when the pair is harassed and chased by a bloodthirsty wolf… a wolf that we never see on-screen. It’s created using stock sound effects, and all the characters react like it’s totally just off-screen, like, you can’t see it but it’s sooooo close and sooooo scary. If I were writing a horror film in which a wolf appears to terrorize the protagonists but I didn’t have the money for a practical wolf puppet or a CG wolf, I would simply cut out the wolf scene.

To his credit, cinematographer Tommy Oceanak works within the micro-budget limitations quite well. He does a lot with a little when it comes to the lighting. The characters only have two practical light sources on them — a flashlight and a lantern — and there’s almost never any other practical light in the scene, yet their faces are always well-lit and visible, and Oceanak can create a pretty good composition every now and then.

Conclusion: Lizzie Lazarus

Lizzie Lazarus is a better title and poster than it is a film. The horror is so nonexistent that this had might as well be billed as a drama, and the relationship between Bethany and Eli might be interesting, but it can’t carry a 90-minute movie. Maybe the issue is that I watched it at home — in a packed theater at Popcorn Frights, this might’ve killed. Who knows? I can forgive all manner of technical shortcomings if my popcorn is buttered and the crowd is energetic.

Lizzie Lazarus premiered at Popcorn Frights Festival 2024 on August 12, 2024.