Three decades on, Joel Schumacher’s Flat­lin­ers is a cheesy, exis­ten­tial delight

“I don’t know, you guys: it’s Hal­loween, there’s a full moon. Don’t you think we might be push­ing it just a lit­tle bit?”

So says Randy Steck­le (Oliv­er Platt), some way into Joel Schumacher’s Flat­lin­ers, as he and four fel­low med­ical stu­dents are about to embark, for their third time, on a clan­des­tine life-and-death exper­i­ment – and he has not even men­tioned the fact that their illic­it extracur­ric­u­lar activ­i­ties are also tak­ing place, much like their more legit­i­mate day­time anato­my class­es, in the decid­ed­ly unclin­i­cal set­ting of a pil­lared build­ing with old mas­ters’ paint­ings of Prometheus all over the walls and giant busts of the med­ical (but also psy­chopom­pic) god Mer­cury lying on the floors. In oth­er words, Randy’s words are also a meta­com­men­tary on the aes­thet­ics of excess pro­pelling the very film that fea­tures him, where every­thing is overde­ter­mined and overblown and just too much.

Still, in Flat­lin­ers the char­ac­ters too are always ​‘push­ing it just a lit­tle bit’, exceed­ing bound­aries and trans­gress­ing lim­its on a quest, as their ring­leader Nel­son Wright puts it, ​“to see if there’s any­thing out there beyond death.” For psy­chot­i­cal­ly arro­gant Nel­son, ser­i­al wom­an­is­er Joe Hur­ley (William Bald­win), mes­sian­ic athe­ist David Labrac­cio (Kevin Bacon) and haunt­ed, death-obsessed Rachel Manus (Julia Roberts) will all, one-by-one, vol­un­tar­i­ly be induced into a flat­lined state of death and then med­ical­ly restored to life some min­utes lat­er, so that they can report back on any expe­ri­ence they might have had while dead, or even any rev­e­la­tion they might have been able to bring from the oth­er side.

At the same time, encour­aged by their med­ical course to be hyper-com­pet­i­tive with each oth­er, and in some of their cas­es nat­u­ral­ly so any­way, they are quick to under­mine any sci­en­tif­ic val­ue that their exper­i­ment might have by con­stant­ly alter­ing its para­me­ters and try­ing to out­do one anoth­er, with each patient stay­ing dead longer than the last. This is as much about the sat­is­fac­tion of ego as the advance­ment of sci­ence, as they var­i­ous­ly seek celebri­ty, self-aggran­dis­e­ment or answers to very per­son­al questions.

So Flat­lin­ers has all the Promethean hubris and mirac­u­lous res­ur­rec­tions of Mary Shelley’s 1818 nov­el Franken­stein, only with­out the mon­ster. Schumacher’s film does, how­ev­er, still qual­i­fy as hor­ror, for while these four, once they have flat­lined, may show zero brain activ­i­ty, their con­sciences still remain very much alive, and after they have returned from death, they are haunt­ed by their own guilty mem­o­ries and beat them­selves up (in once case lit­er­al­ly) over their nag­ging­ly per­sis­tent pasts. These har­row­ing ghost­ly reck­on­ings – which Nel­son terms ​“karmic prob­lems” and Randy calls ​“hee­bie-jee­bie stuff” – are pre­sent­ed as trip­py close encoun­ters, lit in the reds and/​or blues of a clas­sic gial­lo (or of an Eight­ies schlockfest).

With its brat-pack cast of what at least now seems very big names, Flat­lin­ers is a cheesi­ly bom­bas­tic film, full of alpha male char­ac­ters all con­stant­ly vying to get in the pants of the only woman in their midst, and end­less­ly alien­at­ing view­ers with their mas­cu­line swag­ger and aggres­sive rival­ry. The excep­tion to this, anchor­ing all the near-oper­at­ic shrill­ness, is Randy who, despite his name, alone seems unin­ter­est­ed in bed­ding Rachel, and who also alone refus­es to be sub­ject­ed to the fatal exper­i­ment. Instead he hov­ers on the side­lines, pro­vid­ing the group with a voice of rea­son, a poet­ic cho­rus of moral com­men­tary, and a lot of much-need­ed com­ic relief.

Flat­lin­ers is about por­tals that should not be opened – but of course are. ​“There was a door in our old hall­way and I wasn’t sup­posed to go in,” says Rachel of a for­bid­den ingress, made by her at the age of five, which led to her ex-army father’s sui­cide. There is a clear­ly vis­i­ble ​“no access” sign in the build­ing wing where the five stu­dents con­duct their exper­i­ment. There are the alley­ways and tun­nels which lead to night­mar­ish hal­lu­ci­na­tions. And of course there is mor­tal­i­ty itself, a thresh­old which nor­mal­ly one should cross only in one direc­tion. These death-defy­ing pio­neers might won­der if there is real­ly any­thing out there, but what they find is them­selves, and the unre­solved issues of their own psy­ches. It is a lit­tle banal as a solu­tion to the ques­tions raised by the film, but then, who real­ly expects a pop­corn movie to set­tle escha­to­log­i­cal conun­drums that have been puz­zling reli­gion and phi­los­o­phy for millennia?

Flat­lin­ers is released on 4K UHD and Blu-ray, 1 Aug, 2022, by Arrow Video.