Since finishing this movie, her feature debut, Rebecca Matthews has churned out about another half dozen in the past year, some due out in 2020 and some due out next year. You have to admire her work ethic. Momentarily. When you realise that most of them could end up like this one though, well, your opinion could change.
I saw the poster for Pet Graveyard a year or so ago and thought that it was obviously a rip-off of Pet Sematary. It definitely uses that film to sell itself anyway, but the plot is more in line with Flatliners, if Flatliners was written by someone who could barely knit a plot together.
Jessica O'Toole is Lily, a young woman studying to be a nurse. She is roped into a scheme by her brother, Jeff (David Cotter), to help him gain more traffic on his vlog. Jeff plans to "brink" with Francis (Hindolo Koroma) and Zara (Rita Siddiqui). Brinking is when you die for a few minutes, allowing you time to catch up with someone special on the other side. It obviously doesn't go according to plan, with the trio bringing back another presence. Because once you die you cannot come back. The race is then on to beat the reaper figure that is going to kill them off. And you get clumsily-inserted shots of a cat, with eyes made to glow red occasionally.
Sadly, there's nobody working on this film that I can say good things about. I'm sorry. Hey, more power to them if they got a decent payday out of it and another title to add to their filmography. This is one of many small independent UK horrors in recent years to ride the coat-tails of a blockbuster hit and deliver a final result that is depressingly cheap and inept. It would seem that we only have three main categories of British horrors being made nowadays: the gems, the "mockbusters", and a dozen annual selections with the word Krampus in the title.
Matthews shows no style or imagination in her direction, and the scenes on the other side are simply people who seem to be on a black-painted stage. Gore gags are generally awful, there's absolutely no tension, or sense of actual horror, created, and the plotting is quite laughable throughout.
A lot of this is down to the script, by Suzy Spade, which forgets to include anything decent, from the characters to logical progression of the situation. Scares are just not present, and the attempts to instead focus on some of the emotional consequences of playing around with death are cringe-inducing.
O'Toole, Cotter, Koroma, and Siddiqui are not very good, which means I won't spend extra time here being insulting to them. Kate Milner Evans does a bit better, portraying the deceased mother of the two leads, and someone who gets to have the most fun in the third act.
I knew this wasn't going to be good. I hoped I would have some fun with it anyway. That proved difficult. I'll rate it generously, for a minimum degree of competence in certain areas, but don't let that fool you. This is definitely one to avoid, and I'm going to assume that many of the other films churned out by Matthews will be aiming for the same low bar. Which won't stop me checking them out. Eventually.
3/10
https://ko-fi.com/kevinmatthews
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