elisa_jenkins-65819
Everything about this movie is beyond creepy. From the initial premise (native American burial ground turned "sour"), the creepy child Gage, the alarming Trucks barreling down the road, the creepy girl, the creepy maid - and the cake taker for scariest human ever on film: the sister Zelda. That gruesome creature literally gave me nightmares for the better part of my childhood. Why the hell did my parents let me watch this movie?? UNGH, so darn terrifying. It's sad and kind of funny (like all of King's books), but this one is for me the most frightening by far. Ahhh...now I'm thinking about Zelda and her messed up back and skin ad bones body and I want to cry. The perfect horror film.
pyrocitor
"For sale: baby shoes. Never worn."Six words, attributed to Ernest Hemingway, comprising 'literature's greatest tragedy,' that could just as easily pierce the heart as literature's purest horror story. Exhibit A: Stephen King's Pet Sematary, which extrapolates all the devastation of the phrase into something altogether more sickeningly, shamefully empathetic. With a sardonic, throbbing fatalism, King's novel corrodes humanity's most primal fear (death of a child) into a damning Sophie's Choice (what if you could bring back an unholy shadow of them), and the most horrifically empathetic addiction allegory imaginable (you wouldn't. you can't. you are) - and all before any of the customary horror scares rear their grisly heads. No wonder King deemed it so borderline unethically terrifying he almost refused to publish it. Unfortunately, it's a wealth of chilling, philosophical profundity that director Mary Lambert seems largely ambivalent to, when there are jump-scares to be had. She glibly springboards off King's soul-chilling conceit into a quagmire of camp, whizzing past character beats and grim foreshadowing with hyper abandon before going straight for the scare jugular. And her spooky setpieces are, for the most part (the less said about Church, the daftly overplayed horror cat, the better), darn good. Boldly accentuated by Elliot Goldenthal's eerie score, Lambert milks her gory, body horror interludes with the schlocky, squishy grossness of an early Sam Raimi. She exploits the alarmingly believable oozing prosthetics of a mutilated Victor Pascow and the traumatic spectre of a sister mawkishly contorted with spinal meningitis with carnivalesque glee, before plunging into the cackling, knife-wielding-toddler Chucky antics of the third act with cheerful aplomb. She's even cheeky enough to play the the narrative's tragic turning point as a devilish, teasing exercise in morbid, cross-cutting Hitchcockian suspense, as if cinematically bringing to life the laugh/cringe paradox of the average 'dead baby joke' - a darkly apropos comparison. And herein lies Pet Sematary's biggest conundrum: Lambert wants to have her cake and eat it too. She tangibly wants to dive into full Sam Raimi b-movie bedlam, but bridles herself out of seeming obligation to the devastating solemnity of, y'know, the whole dead child thing. The disparity, unsurprisingly, sits palpably uncomfortably, while the script's truncation of the hardships of King's plot without his darkly knowing prose plays as more ridiculous than claustrophobically interconnected. It doesn't help that Lambert is noticeably out of her element handling melodrama, and most of the film's moments of (purportedly) sincere heartbreak play as so wooden they evoke more cringes than her aforementioned oozing, exposed cerebellum. Still: clumsy editing, flat exposition, and vacuous character development are one thing (okay, three things). But seriously: not one. Not two. But three Darth Vader calibre "NOOOOOOOO"s, all underscoring pivotal emotional moments? Better make that cake a cheesecake - and a fairly stale, rotting one, at that. If anything, the proper cast could have helped salvage, and tonally reconciled, Lambert's confused direction. This is not that cast. Instead, Dale Midkiff gives a lead performance so atrociously flat, it'd be safe to give him the benefit of the doubt of him deeply embodying PTSD shock, were his fluctuations in modulation not so amusingly inconsistent with the mandated emotional responses of any given scene. Denise Crosby fares better, even if her anxious fretting may toe the line of a histrionic camp more appropriate for a movie starring gigantic, telepathic alien slugs more often than not. Conversely, Fred Gwynne is rustic perfection as Jud Crandall, the local voice of homespun reason, and Gwynne, working with an unsympathetically hacked up scripted character, essays Crandall's difficult shift from amiable to ominous to achingly sympathetic with consummate, barrel-chested, granite-voiced ease. Still, the show-stealing performance belongs to two-year old(!) Miko Hughes as the story's requisite murderous, resurrected infant, his tiny face emoting to such a viscerally terrifying extent you would swear his expressions were augmented by CGI were the film made in a contemporary context. King's story is so gosh-darn good (good enough to even warrant its egregious, Inglourious Basterds style misspelling) that, even told as clumsily as it is here, it's replete with frights, gruesome fun, and promise. Still, the jarring dissonance between Lambert's schlockier, ironic impulses and the more primal, elegant simplicity of King's horror, combined with a hefty helping of cheese, strand the film in the graveyard of ultimately inferior King adaptations. "Sometimes dead is better," Jud Crandall extols ad nauseam - but Pet Sematary's cinematic unearthing leaves the epitaph of "Sometimes book is better." {but will you watch it anyway? You shouldn't. You know it's a terrible idea. You probably won't like it. But look, there you go, pressing play. Those Micmacs have their ghostly claws in you yet}6/10
calvinnme
Dr. Louis Creed moves his entire family to a remote Maine town where he will be the physician for a local college. Over Thanksgiving, while his wife and children are visiting her parents, his daughter's cat is hit by a truck and killed on the road in front of his house. The road has had a history of taking the lives of beloved pets since the dawn of the automobile age, and there is an actual pet cemetery near their house where local people have interred their dear departed pets, with a child's scribble on a sign marking the place, thus the title "Pet Sematary".Louis' strange neighbor leads him to an ancient Indian burial ground where he is instructed to bury the cat. The next day, the cat appears alive in Louis' garage. Louis thinks he has spared his daughter the trauma of losing her cat. However, the cat's nature has changed. Now the animal delights in tormenting Louis with such gifts as a dead rat while Louis is soaking in the bathtub. You see, while the bodies of the departed return alive, their souls are not those of the original owner. One malicious reincarnated cat can't do much harm, but Louis soon experiences the loss of a human member of his family and he is about to see just how malevolent the forces are that rule the old burial ground.This film was adapted from a story in which the past of Fred Gwynne as the odd neighbor, the Creed housekeeper, and some other background is fleshed out and if it had been somehow included the film might have made more sense, such as explaining the deep the animosity between Louis' inlaws and himself.
Leofwine_draca
Another Stephen King adaptation, with King as screenwriter this time. PET SEMATARY is the place in small-town America (where else?) where kids have been burying their pets for a century. Unfortunately, if pets are buried in a nearby Indian burial ground, they have a tendency to come back to life...A doctor, his wife, two children and pet cat move into the small town and are greeted by a local resident, Jud Crandall (Fred Gwynne). That's right, it's Herman Munster himself, and he's the best thing in this film. A busy road soon kills the cat, and Jud takes Dr Creed down to the burial ground. It comes back from the dead, but of course, something's wrong...PET SEMATARY benefits from some true chills, especially from the dead cat and the creepy cemetery itself. Unfortunately these are the only scary things in the film. Fred Gwynne is always fun to watch and light relief comes from a ghost of a guy who had his head split open. Interesting the actor playing the ghost has gone on to star in some video games, including GABRIEL KNIGHT 2. The ghost keeps on popping up to offer advice which is typically silly and ill thought-out rubbish seemingly borrowed from AN American WEREWOLF IN London.The special effects aren't bad, either, and there are some delightfully gory moments. But when we come to the main cast...oh dear. The main actor just CANNOT ACT. He has an expressionless face throughout the film, even in the horror scenes. I was just crying out for him to scream or something, but no such luck. The puppets in THUNDERBIRDS have more expression than this guy, I think Dale Midkiff is his name. I'm not even going to call this guy an actor, because he cannot act. The corpses in the film were far better actors. The same, too, can be said for the actress who plays his wife, but she has a lesser role in the proceedings and is familiar as Tasha Yar from STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION. Sadly, this was one of my favourite King novels, and this film, with a better cast, could and should have been a lot better than it was.
