Score: 1 / 5
Please let this franchise die. Sometimes dead is better, right?
Mary Lambert's 1989 film adaptation of one of Stephen King's most popular early titles has become, like it or not (though frankly, it's delightful and I have basically no notes), a classic. It even has the iconic theme song. So when the 2019 remake was announced, meant to capitalize on the successes of IT and its ilk, I was pretty excited. Original adaptations of King have their charm, but many were hindered by special effects constraints of the '70s and '80s, to say nothing of soundstages, stoic cameras, and choppy editing. King's most horrifying works tend toward the excessive, the immersive, and the boundary-breaking. We deserve Pennywise through a whirling dervish of a camera, and we deserve the monkey's paw with a bit more bite.
Unfortunately, that film left a lot to be desired, both in its stubborn faithfulness to the original and in its universally acknowledged terrible ending. Faithfulness is good, mind you, but in a remake or prequel you want some insight, explanation, or expansion of the material. We didn't get that in 2019, though it timidly hinted we'd get more information regarding the Mi'kmaq tribe, their burial ground, and the "wendigo" evil that haunts the forest of Ludlow, Maine. Those are the elements fans wanted, not a clumsily reworked pattern of family dissolution in a more palatable way.
Enter Bloodlines, the stupidly titled prequel that takes us back to 1969 for no apparent reason beyond the aesthetics of Vietnam-era rural Americana, a perennial favorite of horror flicks. The story attempts to shed light on the character of Jud Crandall, here dramatized as a teenager (Jackson White) eager to escape his hometown with his girlfriend Norma (Natalie Alyn Lind). Their aim is Michigan, where they want to join the Peace Corps and avoid military service, despite Jud's peers judging him for it. While leaving, Norma is brutalized by a neighbor's dog, a neighbor (Jack Mulhern) who notably just got back from the war and hasn't been acting normally at all. The film's depiction of PTSD is laughably annoying (arguably not unlike several "crazy" horror fiends in '70s movies) until it becomes disappointingly annoying as the neighbor becomes a relentless killer. Sure, the movie claims he's possessed by an evil spirit, but that's only ever clear in the dialogue itself.
A cast that includes Henry Thomas, Pam Grier, and -- I was gobsmacked -- David Duchovny should have meant a good time. They're all hopelessly wasted in roles far below their pedigree. All seem in it only for the paycheck; I'm guessing, from the pathetically low production value, it was either low budget to begin with or what money was budgeted went entirely to those performers (and it still wasn't much). Even the younger performers are grasping at straws here from an underbaked screenplay that does nothing to cultivate the bonds of townsfolk burdened by sour ground and cursed secrets. Even though the boyhood besties get flashbacks to establish shared history, they're weaker moments than you'd find in late seasons of a soap. Worst, though, is the bastardization of the fan-favorite character of Jud, whose personality, voice, and antics don't make sense in this movie and absolutely do not align with the older version of himself we know and love already.
Even watching in a pitch-black room doesn't help the nighttime cinematography, which is largely opaque and inscrutable. The editing is wildly anti-tense, bopping along as if the whole thing were a trailer for a longer, worse movie; it's not even lengthy, but it feels torturously long because there is no suspense or tension to carry us through. The "scares" are basically moments of gore that are so poorly captured, one wonders if the film would have been better to ignore them entirely. The only scene I actually enjoyed was a flashback -- because every prequel should have multiple flashbacks, right? Right? -- to 1674, when settler Ludlow dies while looking for fertile land. He's buried in the "sour ground" and comes back "bad," and the settlers following him apparently make a pact to protect their town from evil spirits who could return. We deserved a hell of a lot more meat to chew on regarding the Wendigo and the Mi'kmaq and the basis of this horror, and even the possibility that the white colonists enhanced or empowered the horror; alternately, we could just leave the story alone, well enough as it is.
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