Three Films Make A Post: Murder is so 1987.

Apparently it’s “movies I liked a lot more than the critical consensus” week this late October around here, as these three films prove.

Pet Sematary: Bloodlines (2023): So yes, I did indeed like Lindsey Anderson Beer’s prequel to the (horrible) Pet Sematary Remake quite a bit. Not as a logical extension of that other movie’s world, nor of that of the novel (one of Stephen King’s very best, if you ask me), but as a very atmospheric horror movie that may not treat its tale about the horrors of familial responsibility with any subtlety, but certainly knows what it is talking about. A palpable sense of dread and doom runs through much of the film, and an acceptance of that dread and doom by the older generation as a fact of life, a feeling that’s occasionally broken by downright nasty violence of the type that really doesn’t care whether characters deserve what happens to them. The third act becomes a bit unfocussed for my tastes, but otherwise, this is the only Pet Sematary movie I genuinely like.

V/H/S/85 (2023): This entry in the traditional bro horror anthology series is not terribly bro at all anymore. In fact, most of the segments, as directed by David Bruckner, Scott Derrickson, Natasha Kermani, Mike P. Nelson and Gigi Saul Guerrero, seem rather more interested in doing cool things with the POV horror set-up of the series. I thought Derrickson’s “Dreamkill” was a particularly strong entry – as well as a nice sibling piece to The Black Phone – with some particularly clever use of found footage as parts of its plot, but there’s not a single segment here that doesn’t do something clever, or freakish, or interesting with its part of the anthology.

Totally Killer (2023): Back to the Future+Happy Death Day+The Final Girls=Totally Killer, and strangely enough, I’m perfectly okay with the equation of Nahnatchka Khan’s movie. More than okay, actually, for I found this slasher time travel comedy often surprisingly funny (the great comical timing of particularly Kiernan Shipka helps a lot there), the jokes never getting so meta-genre I’d lose patience with them, even though there’s a lot of genre consciousness visible during the slasher bits. The emotional beats hit very well as well, so much so that I’d suggest this bit of horror arithmetic has some actual heart.