Evil Never Dies

I watched this movie strictly on a default basis - there was nothing else on! What a pleasant surprise! I highly recommend this movie to anyone who enjoys a good mystery. Excellent acting, good plot twists. Very high quality for a made for TV movie.

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.

I'd give "Evil Never Dies" 3 stars out of 5. At first I was disappointed. 1. It seemed like a typical "made for tv Superstation movie." and 2. I felt like the writer/ director had made some mistakes that made the plot harder to follow.

However, I was wrong. Stick with the movie. It WILL make sense in the end. Probably less action movie than the typical Superstation fare, "Evil Never Dies" gives your brain something to work out.

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.

4/10

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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.