PET SEMATARY: BLOODLINES - Mark Reviews Movies

Pet Sematary: Bloodlines, Paramount+

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 5, 2023

Sometimes, leaving things unexplained is better. That's certainly the case with Pet Sematary: Bloodlines, a prequel to the 2019 adaptation of Stephen King's 1983 novel that changed a good amount of the book and the first movie version from 1989. The year is 1969 here, which means the story explains how the old man who warns a new family in town about the dangers of a resurrecting graveyard learned about those dangers. Even those who haven't seen either movie probably knows them already, of course, because, like so much of the horror maestro's work, this story has become part of the cultural consciousness.

What, then, is the actual point of this movie? It's difficult to tell if the screenplay by director Lindsey Anderson Beer and Jeff Buhler actually knows what it's supposed to be doing. It basically tells us the same story as before, only in a different time period and with some new characters, most of whom have nothing to learn about the mystery of the pet cemetery on the outskirts of a small Maine town. Those who do have to discover the secret figure it out pretty quickly, too, and then, it's just a matter of trying to stop some resurrected corpses from killing people.

There's no moral quandary to be found here. That was one of the key points of King's story, which dealt with grief and the urge to bring back a deceased loved one and the horror that results from having such an unnatural wish fulfilled.

This movie opens with that potential story already finished, as a grieving father buries his son, killed in the Vietnam War, in the eponymous ground. Don't ask how he kept the news of the son's death overseas from reaching anyone else or the basic logistics of how Bill (David Duchovny) could possibly manage to obtain his dead son's body under such circumstances. It has to happen, so that the movie can have some period-specific weight and, more importantly, that the plot can actually happen. It's never good when such a transparent contrivance serves as a movie's opening scene.

Bill really doesn't matter, anyway. That's a point that becomes clear early and is solidified with his unceremonious exit from the story—a thing that happens a lot here, because the characters exist for only one of two purposes—much later. No, our main character is a younger Jud Crandall (Jackson White), and even before that opening scene, it's not a good sign that the filmmakers couldn't even convince John Lithgow, who played the older character in the 2019 version, to take some easy money for what could have been a literally phoned-in voice-over performance.

Jud is about to join the Peace Corps with his girlfriend Norma (Natalie Alyn Lind), who's bitten by a zombie dog and basically disappears from the narrative until she can put in some peril during the climax. The dog belongs to Bill and his now-zombified son Timmy (Jack Mulhern), who looks a little smudged with mud—not too bad, in other words, for a walking, talking, and decomposing dead body, really. All of the zombies look this way, as do some of the characters at times, since the climax takes place in a dark cavern with a lot of paths for a zombie to get ahead of potential victims, apparently.

Timmy, Jud, and Manny (Forrest Goodluck) used to be the best of friends, as several flashbacks trying to compensate for the absence of any characterization show us. Time, the war, and, now, the fact that one of them is a zombie get in the way.

What is there to say about this thin excuse for a plot, really? Timmy starts behaving strangely and eventually starts killing or siccing his undead dog on a couple of townsfolk. That stops for a bit so that Jud and Manny can find an old book about early colonials discovering the cursed graveyard, while Jud's father (played by Henry Thomas) simultaneously reads his father's journal with the exact same history lesson. Nothing is gained here, except for some words about an ancient evil and that the secret to killing this kind of zombie involves destroying its eyes. That second bit of information probably could come in handy about 50 years after this story, but Jud must forget it over the decades, despite how many times characters here yell and remind each other about aiming for the eyes.

Repetitive and shallow and occasionally contradictory, Pet Sematary: Bloodlines is a barely by-the-books horror story. It doesn't do much, because there's very little for this unnecessary prequel to do in the first place.

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