Pet Sematary: Bloodlines (2023) automatically makes the original, however good or bad it may have been, orders of magnitude better, if only by comparison. However, I would go out on a limb that the 2019 remake had already achieved that goal.
In the 1989 film, a dead cat interred in the titular burial ground came back as an undead real cat (in my definition of “real cat,” a live animal and a prop such as an animatronic puppet may overlap). In Bloodlines, a dog undergoes the same process but returns as a crummy computer-generated visual effect. That’s some evil hoodoo right there.
You can’t expect too much from a movie wherein the moral of the story is placed at the beginning of the story — akin to putting the cart in front of the horse, but then that’s what all prequels do. Moreover, didn’t we learn that “sometimes, dead is better” 34 years ago? Forty, if we go all the way back to the novel.
Bloodlines is not just dumb; it’s retroactively dumb. The plot, such as it is, expands on an anecdote that Fred Gwynne told Dale Midkiff in Sematary ‘89, revolving around a local man called Bill Baterman who buried his young son Timmy after he was killed near the end of World War II (retconned to Vietnam in Bloodlines), only for Timmy to come back from the dead as a Monster from Beyond the Veil.
Gwynne’s character, Jud Crandall, now played by Jackson White, discovers that “the founding families” — including his own ancestors — of the town of Ludlow, Maine, “made a pact when this town was founded” to stop whatever evil lurks beyond the woods “from spreading.” This revelation results in a flashback in a film that is itself a glorified flashback. In a nutshell, the town’s original settlers first encountered the evil in the year of Our Lord 1674. The obvious question is, what kind of an idiot would establish a town there?
Seriously, these guys find that the leader of their expedition has been turned into a homicidal revenant, and somehow they go, “hey, why don’t we build a town right here in this place that is lousy with crop rot — even though we’ve been “tasked with finding fertile land” — and name it after our friend whom we just saw feasting on human entrails?”
Baterman (David Duchovny) buries Timmy (Jack Mulhern) and Timmy’s dog with the expected results, and the dog attacks Jud’s girlfriend Norma (Natalie Alyn Lind) before eventually being put down by mailwoman Marjorie (Pam Grier) — because who better than a postal worker, a dog’s natural enemy, to deal with a zombie pooch? I understand Baterman wishing to be reunited with his only son, but the dog too?
To make a dumb story short, Jud ends up assuming his father’s mantle as the caretaker “of the fucked-up land we created,” and his parting words are “stay the fuck out of Ludlow.” What co-writer/director Lindsey Anderson Beer apparently forgot is that old man Crandall was all too eager to share the secret of the pet cemetery with Midkiff’s character, and even helped him bury the aforementioned cat (by the time he warned Midkiff against burying his dead baby in the “sour ground,” it was already too late). Thus, through the filmmaker’s poor attention to detail, the hero will have gone from “stay the fuck out of Ludlow” to “come one, come all to the Pet Sematary.”
