slayrrr666
"Evil Never Dies" is a decent enough slasher without a whole lot else about it.**SPOILERS**After the death of his wife, Detective Mark Ryan, (Thomas Gibson) catches the serial killer, William Charles Lee, (Simon Bossell) who he had been actively involved in hunting, and is able to get him sentenced to death. Due to the instability of his nature, he is transferred to campus security for nearby Halmont College, and is assigned to be partnered with Chris Thompson, (Christopher Norris) a fellow campus security worker. Upon arriving, he meets up with Professor Arkin, (John Waters) and his assistant Eve, (Katherine Heigl) and tries to get acclimated to campus life. Told of new medical experiments they are conducting in a state-of-the-art lab on campus, a series of break-ins in the morgue start to concern him, and all attempts to find out are restricted. Going to her for help, he learns about their true intentions with chemical treatments to revive dead cells in human bodies. Realizing that one of the subjects is the same killer he caught, he tries to stop them from experimenting on him, only for the experiment to work, reanimating him and sending him on another rampage and forcing him to stop the killer again.The Good News: This here was a somewhat overall decent film. One of the few things it gets right is that rather complicated way of explaining the killer's emergence into the world, as there's a lot of good to come from these. The method of doing so, with the detailed and quite efficient manner with it's long sequences inside the lab with all the medical experiments and equipment making for a series of great scenes that showcase how much went into the back-story about the reanimation. The scene it happens in is quite fun and the organization of how it goes down is quite the blast to see. There's also quite a few decent chases in here in the second half. Most of the second half actually is a chase, from the creepy escape in the fog-shrouded parking lot to the one through the quad into the medical lab, this one has a lot of great, exciting chases. There's a fun shootout in a motel parking lot, a really great encounter in the lab and the final confrontation is a real blast. The last part of this that works is the tense opening, which is pretty strong to feature in a film like this and it starts off the film with a strong, cruel opening. These here are the film's good parts.The Bad News: This here has a few problems to it that are a little damaging. The fact that it takes so long to accept the situation is a little hard to believe, and this one handles it the wrong way. This one has the one person who knows the truth yelling it at the same people over and over again, despite being in the proper situation to convince others and the fact that the repeat occurrences of the same situation does the film no favors. It just looks sloppy and lazy to keep doing that. Also quite sloppy is the twist at the end, which is quite easy to spot, makes no sense and seems to be there just to keep the film going, which it really should've done a better job of doing so. The fact that being unable to stretch the film out points to the fact that it is way too short. This is barely over an hour, and much of that time is spent on it going into depth over the chemical experiments, leaving a large portion of the film action-less with only a couple scattered moments to keep it going but mostly nothing of excitement happens and the short amount of screen-time with the actual action is so clustered at the end it becomes imminently noticeable. The last flaw in here is the that it feels way too sanitized and cleaned up that it feels like the made-for-TV film it was made to be. The kills are bloodless, the violence is non-existent and neutered to feature kills that won't provide any to begin with and there's no nudity in the sex scene. There's more to come from this factor, and are all apart of the film's flaws.The Final Verdict: With a few good parts to it, this one here is certainly watchable but there's not a whole lot here to it. Give it a shot if nothing else is on or available or if you're a fan of these TV-thrillers, otherwise this one can be easily skipped without missing on anything.Rated R: Violence, Language and a mild sex scene
Michael_Elliott
Evil Never Dies (2003) ** 1/2 (out of 4) Made for TV take on the Frankenstein story has an early performance by Katherine Heigl from Knocked Up fame and this is the only reason I watched this but the movie turned out to be pretty good. Thomas Gibson plays a cop who has his life turned upside down after a serial killer murders his wife. The killer dies via lethal injection but a nutty scientist steals his body and eventually brings him back to life. Once alive, the killer goes after the cop who has now befriended a woman (Heigl) who helped in the scientist's experiment. I wasn't expecting too much out of this film but some tight direction really picks this up and makes this better than most of your made for TV films out there. The opening sequence with the cop's wife getting murdered contains some nice suspense and the director does a great job at building the scene. The movie goes by at a very fast pace and Gibson makes for a good leading character. Heigl adds nice support as well. The film's biggest problem are some incredibly stupid plot holes that take place to make the cop look crazy. These scenes come off pretty badly and are just downright stupid but outside of this the film works on many levels.
Boba_Fett1138
The movie isn't afraid to steal from many other movies such as; "Se7en", "Hollow Man" and maybe perhaps even a bit of "Fallen". A movie that steals a lot from other movies isn't by definition a bad one, I mean as long as its done to strengthens the movie and its story and characters, I tend to forgive them for that.To be honest, the movie also begin well but went downhill pretty fast about halve way through, when the movie was starting to hang together from its coincidences. There just happens to be a professor who is researching on how bringing the death back to life. That researcher just happens to work out the same school our 'main hero' gets stationed as a guard. That professor just happens to pick the death body of the killer of our 'main hero's' wife. In the end they desperately try to connect it all and make sense to all those too obvious coincidences but by then the movie has already lost all of its credibility.The movie is definitely a better looking one than just an average made for TV movie. It's style is what saved the movie until it was about halve way through.It's a thriller that at times even uses horror elements in it. A thriller with horror elements in it is most of the time an unlikely and daring combination that also not too often works out greatly. For most part the combination works out in this movie until, again, it reaches about the halve way point.Thought it was a watchable enough movie, until it just got sillier and sillier and worse and worse.4/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/
nicolabennett_80
This movie was on TV one night when I couldn't sleep and I honestly wish that I just stayed staring at my bedroom ceiling rather than watch it.It's maybe the most obvious thriller I have ever seen. You should see the twist that is coming to you at the end from halfway through at the absolute latest due to far less than subtle foreshadowing and you can predict the rest of the plot from that point onward. They don't seem to make any attempt to rationalise the obvious impossibilities they expect the watcher to swallow in the name of 'science'.Katherine Heigl is still great, just a shame she wasted her time on such a pointless movie.
