streaming horror: no one will save you, pet sematary: bloodlines, and five nights at Freddy's

If movies were judged on degree of difficulty, No One Will Save You would receive extremely high marks. Writer/director Brian Duffield starts with a cool elevator pitch (what if a home invasion thriller doubled as an alien invasion thriller?) and ratchets up the creative challenge by staging the film with no supporting cast to speak of and virtually zero dialogue. Working within those restrictive parameters, he nonetheless does a deft job establishing key details of world and character - Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever) is a young woman who lives a solitary life in the isolated farmhouse where she grew up, and appears to be ostracized by the neighboring townsfolk for reasons unknown. One night, she’s alerted to the presence of an intruder in her home - a gray-skinned alien humanoid with telekinetic abilities - and from there Duffield keeps his foot firmly mashed to the accelerator, keeping the audience off-balance as his script begins zigging and zagging in unexpected directions.​

This proves to be tremendous B-movie fun… for about 45 minutes or so. In spite of the propulsive pace, it’s incredibly difficult - even for a talented filmmaker - to keep upping the narrative ante while avoiding repetition (there’s only so much fresh cat-and-mousing you can stage throughout the house and in the neighboring forest) and doing enough character-wise (again, without the benefit of any dialogue) to knit it all together convincingly. The rules and inner logic start to feel fuzzy after a while. Nonetheless, Dever proves insanely, compulsively watchable - it’s the mark of a truly gifted actress when you strip away every tool but her own expressiveness and it remains more than enough for her to single-handedly carry an entire picture. Duffield, who wrote such films as The Babysitter and Underwater, is known for his innovative approach to screenwriting (a sample page from this movie features terse, bolded action descriptions embedded in a wall of text that reads “she can’t move” over and over again). No One Will Save You is ultimately too much of a high-wire trapeze act for its own good, but I seriously dig the way Duffield’s creative mind works.

I doubt even the most ardent fans of Stephen King’s 1983 novel Pet Sematary would suggest the concept is remotely compelling enough to build an entire cinematic universe around. And yet, following Mary Lambert’s original 1989 adaptation (and 1992 sequel) and the largely indifferent 2019 remake presided over by Dennis Widmyer and Kevin Kölsch, we somehow have this nonessential prequel - which presents itself as the origin story you never knew you needed (or wanted) for Jud Crandall (the character memorably played by Fred Gwynne in the original and John Lithgow in the remake, and mostly portrayed here as some wide-eyed goober by Jackson White). Crandall is preparing to leave the town of Ludlow for good with his girlfriend Norma (the scorchingly photogenic Natalie Alyn Lind) in 1969, but events conspire to keep him put… right as the reclusive Bill Baterman (David Duchovny - what in the world?) reveals that his son Timmy recently returned from Vietnam in one piece.​

Of course we catch on pretty quickly that Timmy did not, in fact, return from Vietnam in one piece, and almost certainly took an ill-advised detour through the pet sematary… the ancient and sinister burial ground that resurrects the dead, but brings them back, well… not quite right (this is actually based on a story Jud tells in the novel, though Timmy served in World War II). Timmy (played by Jack Mulhern from Mare of Easttown) doesn’t necessarily act as if he’s been infected with malevolence; rather he appears to be suffering from a form of PTSD (something one imagines that director Lindsey Anderson Beer was attempting to grapple with on some vague thematic level). Pet Sematary: Bloodlines delves into the dark history of the town, but like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, it’s really just an excuse to rehash the original like a slightly reshuffled deck of cards. There’s nothing revelatory to be found here. “Sometimes dead is better,” Jud says, in one of the novel’s more iconic lines. That goes for people, and for IP as well. Some things needn’t be continually resurrected.

Five Nights at Freddy’s is based on the hugely popular video game series, and those who haven’t been indoctrinated will likely be left scratching their heads over what’s essentially a Chuck E. Cheese version of The Black Phone (infused with a healthy dose of Nightmare on Elm Street dream logic). Josh Hutcherson stars as Mike Schmidt (no apparent connection to the baseball legend), who has no choice but to take a gig as the night security guard at the long defunct pizza parlor Freddy Fazbear’s, which garnered significant notoriety back in the 80s after several kids went missing (Mike is tasked with caring for his socially withdrawn younger sister Abby - a slightly more intriguing dynamic than if he’d simply been given a daughter). Mike, who attempts lucid dreaming each night in the hopes of unraveling his brother’s childhood abduction, soon comes to realize that Freddy and his animatronic pals (Bonnie, Chica and Foxy) come to creaking, lurching life after hours… their intentions unclear (though if the fate of Mike’s predecessor is any indication, probably not great).  ​

Five Nights at Freddy’s has been demolishing box office records (I took the coward’s way out and simply watched it on Peacock), but it’s hard to see it as frankly much more than the rough skeleton of a movie. The dramatic tension remains slack and largely ill-defined until the third act (the script has to contrive antagonists - such as a group of would-be looters, who receive their just desserts in the film’s best sequence - for fear that nothing would happen otherwise). The main reason to see the movie is the marvelous job Jim Henson’s Creature Shop does bringing Freddy and friends to life in all their clanking, tactile, grubby-felted glory - every time they’re on-screen, the film sputters to life. Hutcherson has an easy, appealing chemistry with Elizabeth Lail (who looks like Jennifer Lawrence’s peppier younger sister who did more extracurriculars in high school) as Vanessa, a cop who stops by Freddy’s every night and appears to know more than she lets on. The mythology feels tenuous yet oddly overwrought (an extension of the games and their supposedly convoluted lore). It’s unlikely this adaptation will convert many newcomers, but the Five Nights faithful seem well-pleased, for what it's worth.