Irresistible premise.....which is why you'll probably see a remake for each succeeding generation......Med school students stopping and restarting their hearts as a way to secure a brief round-trip ticket to the afterlife......you know, just to see what goes on there after you step into the big white light......
Fashion designer turned movie director Joel Schumacher was never much of a director, but oh boy did his movies look stylish. The Medical school and hospital in this movie appear situated in cavernous, abandoned cathedrals, complete with assorted gargoyles and creepy statuary.......if the Hunchback Of Notre Dame had Blue Cross, the ambulance would speed him right to the front gates of this place.....
Our foolhardy team of young Docs (Keifer Sutherland, Kevin Bacon, William Baldwin, Julia Roberts, Oliver Platt), after bouts of stop-'n-start-my-heart, discover that Schumacher's Afterlife is like a creepy theme park.....Six Flags Over Your Part Sins......
What's worse, the Afterlife Theme Park characters invade the real world to torment the daytrippers (who like Dr.Frankenstein, messed with God, which we all know is worse than pulling those warning tags off the bottoms of mattresses...)
Bacon and Sutherland become haunted by the kids they tormented and bullied in childhood.....(Sutherland's personal wraith, a little troll right out of Stephen King, arrives regularly to beat the crap out of Sutherland with assorted blunt instruments.....Sutherland spends most of the movie looking like he did another 5 seasons of "24")......Baldwin, a perv L
othario who secretly videotapes his one-night whambams, has televised visions of his victims scolding him....(which makes no sense in this movie's context, since all those girls are presumably still alive).....Roberts' dead father, a suicide, drops in for unannounced visits, upsetting her preconceived notions of the afterlife as a warm and fuzzy, brightly lit nursing home.....
Oliver Platt avoids all the otherworldly drama, since his one and only function is to provide snarky one-liners and comedy relief.......he's sort of an entertainingly cheeky DVD commentary built into the body of the movie itself.
Absurd? Overheated? Ridiculous? Okay.....but we still watched it riveted, 'cause who doesn't want to know what happens after we leave this world? And watching all those future movie and TV stars in the prime of their youth turns the whole thing into a Jumbo Guilty Pleasure....
So we'll hit the Defibrillator paddles three times for "Flatliners" (***)......Clear!!
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