Posted in: Movies, Review | Tagged: paramount, Pet Sematary: Bloodlines, stephen king

Pet Sematary: Bloodlines Tries Hard To Justify Existence {Review}

Pet Sematary: Bloodlines hits Paramount+ today, and while not great, it is a quick and breezy watch that adds to a horror classics mythology.

Pet Sematary is now a franchise but an unlikely one. Almost nobody asked for sequels to the reboot from 2019, so Paramount has decided to give us a prequel. Most rolled their eyes when it was announced, but the film, now streaming on Paramount+, is way better than it has any business being. It has many flaws, like an overreliance on cheap jump scares and an unnecessarily convoluted plot, but overall, it breezes through its runtime and has some good performances. Sometimes, dead is better, but in this case, death can be postponed a bit so we can get the actual prequel that we would want.

Pet Sematary Goes Back In Time

Prequels are all the rage, so it makes sense that they went this route with more Pet Sematary than trying to continue the series in the present day. This one follows a young Jud Crandall (Jackson White) in Vietnam-era Ludlow. When his friend Timmy is killed there, his father Bill (David Duchovny) buries him in the old sour ground, and he returns to life. When mysterious things start happening around Ludlow, Jud and their friend Manny (Forrest Goodluck) dig into the history of the town and those burial grounds, using Jud's father's diary as a guide, not only about what is happening but also how to be the caretaker to make sure nobody abuses those lands.

We also get a tease about how those lands were settled and found to be "sour," and that story is honestly way more interesting than the one we get here. People make terrible decisions at every turn, and relying more on CGI than practical effects stands out like a sore thumb. Writer/director Lindsey Anderson Beer greatly respects the source material; with all of the winks and nods, we get to the series and the original Stephen King novel. A slight change in the timeline makes the story hit harder, changing it to the Vietnam War instead of World War 2. But with a runtime of only 84 minutes, Beer is not given any time to expand on any of the ideas this Pet Sematary prequel is bringing to the table.

Still, the cast is game. White brings a lot of energy as Jud, and by the end, has accepted his fate as the new caretaker of the Pet Sematary. His acceptance comes with a sadness he allows to enter his performance a smidge at a time, and it works. Both Duchovny and Henry Thomas also help elevate the proceedings as fathers trying to deal with their grief the way a person from Ludlow would. Things happening offscreen take a lot of the trauma and tension out of the film, but these three do enough to keep our attention.

What we have here is another okay legacy sequel/prequel that will live forever on a streaming service and be entirely forgotten. Beer does an admirable job, but with a ridiculously short runtime to work with and a focus on the wrong Ludlow origin story, there wasn't a chance to make anything that truly stands out. Give us the town's origins, and then we will talk.

Pet Sematary: Bloodlines

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Review by Jeremy Konrad

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5/10

Pet Sematary: Bloodlines is fine, but at 84 minutes barely has any time to cover all of the ground it attempts to. Still, a few solid performances make this one more tolerable than other pointless legacy sequels.

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