Pluskylang
Great Film overall
Bea Swanson
This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.
Marva
It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,
neongen
First I'll write that Karoake is great, this follow-up is crap. The dialogue, characters, casting sets and plot all stink. Worse it makes a muddle of Karoake , which seemed to be an outstanding story on the nature of reality....how was Feeld affecting "real world" events ? Cold Lazarus never answers this and dwells on societal control of substitutes for things such as cigarettes and coffee ( tho never touching on why this should be important to the "ruling powers") ..crap. CL never explains how Feeld affected reality in Karoake, but throws in his twin brother's history in some meaningless way that does not settle the questions raised by Karoake at all.Cheap claptrap. What did Feeld say at the end ?
johannes-kemppanen
This mini-series was shown on Finnish TV on last Christmas. What brought me to watch it was a picture on a TV guide magazine and the premise: "scientists are trying to recover memories from a frozen head." OK... As a fan of sci-fi in general I did some searching on the Web and was impressed enough to decide that I would spend some 4 hours of my precious Christmas holiday watching this one. I wasn't disappointed.Cold Lazarus tells the story of a group of scientists in the future who are trying to recover memories from a hundreds-of-years old frozen severed head of a screenwriter Daniel Feeld, a character who was introduced in the earlier mini-series "Karaoke". (Which was also shown on the day before "Cold Lazarus") The man died to cancer in "Karaoke", but apparently he decided to get his head frozen.The future world is a truly strange place where giant media empire controls the people. It seems truly unethical to make entertainment from a dead man's most painful memories. (Including very disturbing images of sexual abuse as a child.) Then there was also this group called RON (Reality Or Nothing) who fought with weapons against the media. Interesting analogy to today.Technical quality was overall very good. The special effects were fine, although some set pieces and especially props had a "cheap" look on them. That didn't bother me too much."Cold Lazarus" is always worth watching.
artwk
I am not a fan of Dennis Potter, although I believe that he could have produced good work if the producers of his TV series had been less indulgent, and had forced him to cut his scripts in the interest of wit, point, and (above all) brevity.I once sat through "The Singing Detective", which was not bad apart from the umpteen pieces of repeat footage. I even endured the Bob Hoskins version of "Pennies From Heaven", which I thought would never end, and which was padded out with surely every third-rate song from the 1920's. At least half of it should have been left on the cutting-room floor. The shortened film version starring Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters was a perfect validation of the adage "Less is more".In another piece Potter used grownups in the roles of children. This was a good basic idea, but he did nothing inventive with it. I found it as watchable as a one-joke comedy.Some of Dennis Potter's other pieces were so dull and slow-moving that I gave up after ten minutes. But none was a feeble as "Cold Lazarus", in which it was proposed that all records of past history had been inexplicably lost (HOW?), and in which one character came up with a BRILLIANT (?) idea for a new TV series, which clearly was nothing more than a rehash of those old mystery/horror TV series produced by Rod Serling and others.Maybe Dennis Potter had never watched TV back in those days. A pity, because he could have learned a lot.
sonofhades
This story is a very good story in itself and if you've seen the story (behind Lazarus) you will get even more out of the serie. I enjoyed this "realistic" sci-fi stuff more than most of the hollywood style bang-boom-big explosion kind of action sci-fi.But I must warn you, if you hate each and every drama movie, go watch something else. All other people should watch this one.
