1 out of 5

Directed by: Lindsey Anderson Beer

Being a horror fan does, often, mean being… accepting. Of the “rules” of horror, or of the nature of franchise sequels, or of the limitations of budget or time, or how the focus of a movie may just be jump scares and nothing else, and so on, and so on. So it can often boil down to: what do we think the intention of this flick’s makers’ was, and did they succeed at that?

But sometimes, you can’t even get there. Sometimes you’re just left wondering: Why? Why make this?

I was a fan of the Pet Sematary update. The original had gothic flair, but was not well written, and though the 2019 version also had its flaws, I felt it corrected for a lot of the stupider story gaps; it was conceptually tighter. While I never felt the lore behind PS required much elucidation, sure, make a prequel that dives into the events of Ludlow, Maine, before those concerning the Creed family of the main films. So Bloodlines, said prequel, was not anathema to me when announced. I wasn’t expecting a great film, but I was curious – curious even to visit / revisit all the prior flicks, on my way to being ready to accept whatever Bloodlines may be, on that sliding horror scale.

And though its lead-in voiceover is suggestive of its generally pointless dialogue – much of the dialogue just assumes you know what the Pet Sematary does; it assumes you are here already, and don’t need any further reason for watching – Lindsey Anderson Beer and DP Benjamin Kirk Nielsen continue with the warm but sharp cold/warm visual style of 2019, and Jackson White makes for an engaging Jud Crandall, giving his character some wariness behind the eyes. Henry Thomas is there as his father (a mainstay in horror nowadays, thanks to Mike Flanagan), and we have a bearded David Duchovny playing the local who kicks off this 1969 edition of “sematary” resurrections, first with his dog, then with his Vietnam-vet son; this’ll do fine. And I’d say, initially, it does, in a kind of hasty, 84-minute runtime fashion – conjuring a reason for Jud and his ladyfriend Norma (Natalie Alyn Lind) to belay their escape to the peace corps and deal with this dead dog instead – up until said dog gnaws on Norma’s arm, while dead son Timmy (Jack Mulhern) looks on, and, oh, am I sorry, is the fact that these two are ghouls a twist? Didst I spoil? It’s hard to say, given that the film hardly tells us anything about it, but the dog likes to stare and growl and Timmy has some pretty poorly synced foley effects making his bones creak when he walks, and at some point you see Duchovny with a shovel, and this is how Bloodlines works: you know all this stuff, right, so do we need to explain it?

This is not respecting the audience’s intelligence; it’s forgetting to make a coherent narrative. Combine that with a clearly low budget and an approach of shooting around it that involves not shooting anything – just do some quick cuts, it’ll be fine – and PS: Bloodlines becomes clunkier and less satisfying, disconnected scene by disconnected scene. It’s never clear how much Jud or others understand about the “sematary”, half treating it like town folklore, half treating it like a godawful secret how-dare-you; it’s not clear what Jud’s relationship is with his father, Thomas doing his best to juggle the script’s ambivalent tone; and I love whenever people who are charged with protecting a town for centuries from some unspeakable evil apparently never learned how to actually stop that evil. Also: what’s the evil? Why is it evil? Nudge nudge, goes PS: Bloodlines – you don’t really care, do you?

There are threads of competence throughout the film, but not a willingness to connect them. And even on a basic level, I don’t even get how this aligns with the previous movie – 2019 or 1989 – in very key ways, making the project beg that Why? question even more.

Every review of this is obligated to mention “dead is better” somewhere; I will just say that the film’s final sin is using this in a speech where it doesn’t even contextually make much sense. Oh well.