There weren’t a whole lot of people out there crying for Stephen King’s Pet Sematary – which had already gotten a feature-length adaptation, a sequel, and a remake – to be handed the prequel treatment, and the consensus is that the upcoming Bloodlines has failed to justify its existence.
Despite being given a thumbs-up by its originator, co-writer and director Lindsey Anderson Beer’s supernatural chiller has been shrugged at by critics, currently holding a Rotten Tomatoes approval rating of just 31 percent, not that such tepid reviews should come as much of a surprise given the inessential nature of the project as a whole.
The filmmaker’s next feature will be another do-over, with Sleepy Hollow the subsequent well-known property set to be slathered in a coat of blood-red paint. In an interview with Collider, Anderson Beer revealed there will be certain similarities between the two, although you can crack your own obvious jokes about their equally needless nature if you want.
“Sleepy Hollow… You know, there are a lot of skill sets that are similar in terms of its beloved IP. It’s also the same kind of thing where when I was doing Bloodlines, I kept asking myself when I was doing the rewrites, ‘What would I want to know as a Pet Sematary fan? What are the questions left unanswered from the book? And what are the parts of the book that haven’t been explored in movies?’ The legends of Sleepy Hollow are so rich, and as I started doing the research about the Hudson Valley and true ghost stories, I just, I got addicted to that too.”
It’ll be hard to dislodge Tim Burton’s version as the definitive big screen Sleepy Hollow, but despite the apathetic response to Bloodlines, everyone should be willing to give it the benefit of the doubt until it arrives.
Published: Sep 26, 2023 11:24 am