Pet Sematary: Bloodlines

• Co-Written and Directed by Lindsey Anderson Beer (Directorial Debut)
• September 23, 2023 (Fantastic Fest) / October 6, 2023 (Paramount+)
• Based on the 1983 novel Pet Sematary by Stephen King

In 1969 a young man discovers a local cemetery that can raise the dead and must deal with the aftermath.

After watching this it is clear Pet Sematary: Bloodlines is the directorial debut of Lindsey Anderson Beer. And I am betting Beer wanted to do an artful film rather than a horror movie given what we ultimately got here.

This is a pretty unfrightening horror film. There is some mild weirdness but nothing scary. The movie as a whole comes off much more as a coming-of-age /slice-of-the-era movie set during the 60s. Timmy Baterman (Jack Mulhern) who was recently buried in the cemetery by his dad Bill (David Duchovny) after coming home dead from Vietnam-maybe. He could just have easily committed suicide based on appearance and dialogue. It glosses over some of the important elements while focusing on unimportant.

You are indifferent towards the characters at best and at worst find them unlikeable. Everybody in here has some great axe to grind over something. And if they don’t have one, they find one as the story progresses. They put a bit of a lantern on that by saying the spirit stirs stuff up when it jacks a body. But some of this is just the characters digging stuff up and getting upset WITHOUT evil influences. 

Bloodlines is a prequel film that explains the origin of how Jud Crandall (Jackson White) seems to know so much about the sour ground. What it doesn’t explain is how he was so easily swayed in the remake to go and bury a cat to show his neighbor what would happen. It also seems to hint of the reality of the town as an inconsistently known open secret. While there are the descendants of the founders who know what’s going on, here there also still appears to be people that randomly know what’s going on-or at least suspect it.

But this movie is so boring and so not frightening or creepy or anything. Weirdness does not equal horror. Pet Sematary: Bloodlines is a lot of yammering but not a great many scares or much of anything else. They just talk you to death. Heavy dialogue in any movie is not bad but heavy dialogue needs to move the story forward. It just doesn’t do that here. It just stretches things out to a conclusion that is already known.

There is not much story here to justify the length. This is something so much shorter. A little judicious editing and elimination of characters that offered really nothing like the mayor or Marjorie (Pam Grier) we would have a much better AND shorter film. We the audience already knew what was coming. They just highlighted the known.

The only genuinely interesting part is the flashback element which concerns the founding of Ludlow. It is interesting and hints at a vastly more interesting story than what we get in the film. Beyond that nothing really goes anywhere intriguing.

Why did they make Pet Sematary: Bloodlines? I do not know. Maybe they just wanted to keep control of the property before it slipped into someone else’s hands or reverted back to Stephen King. Whatever the reason this is not interesting enough to justify viewership. You can skip this one unless somebody else turns it on, but you’ll probably not care.