Pet Sematary is a film that is a remake of another film, which was an adaption of a Stephen King novel.
When you think of the film Pet Sematary you either think “huh? I never saw it,” or you think of the line “sometimes dead is better”. I’m sure there’s a lot of tortured metaphors I can come up with here with this remake. The general premise is that the Creed family move to a new small rural home in Maine, because Stephen King, and whilst there they discover that an old cursed burial ground is on their property. Anything dead that you bury at the cemetery is brought back to life, but it’s evil.
It’s hard to talk about this film without directly talking about spoilers since character deaths are the central driving force of the film, so if you want to go into this film completely fresh, probably turn away now. So anyway, the Creed family are made up of Louis (Jason Clarke), Rachel (Amy Seimetz) and their daughter Ellie and son Gage. Spooky things, barely at all related to the plot begin to happen. Like Louis, who is a doctor, keeps seeing the ghost of a dead guy he failed to save while at work. Rachel keeps having visions of her crippled sister from when she was a child. They have spooky dreams. These things have virtually no bearing on the plot. Anyway. Their neighbour, Jud (John Lithgow), introduced Louis to the creepy cemetery’s supernatural powers and they bring back the family’s dead cat. The cat comes back as an evil cat, which mainly sits and glares at the family and occasionally claws them when they piss it off (you know, like a regular cat). So eventually there’s a big horrific truck accident and Ellie is killed. The family is mortified. Louis decides to use the cemetery to bring her back, and of course she comes back as an evil demon girl.
That’s basically the plot. It’s not one of King’s finest, yet there seems to be this strange nostalgia for the 80s version of this film. The movie does attempt to make some swerves here and there. In the original, it was Gage who was killed and brought back to life. And the ending differs somewhat. But ultimately it’s the same gist. A grief-stricken dad brings back his daughter by using evil black magic and she comes back and causes all kinds of trouble (i.e. murder and arson).
The directors are Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer, whom I have never heard of before but I believe they’ve mainly done short films and some TV work. Jeff Buher wrote the screenplay, who also wrote the 2008 horror film ‘The Midnight Meat Train’.
Here’s the thing about Pet Sematary. There isn’t much to do with the plot, so the film needs padding. That’s where the extraneous spooky moments come in that don’t directly connect with the film. Rachel has a little subplot where she has these memories of her older sister who had a twisted spine. There is one effective sequence in the film where she’s basically haunted by her sister and it was probably the scariest thing in the movie. But unfortunately, little else does much in the movie.
Performances are all fine, but forgettable. John Lithgow is fine but he doesn’t really do much to leave a mark. I will say, a lot of the movie does rely heavily on the performance of Jete Laurence as young Ellie, and it’s always a risk when your movie is so centrally focused on a child. But she does a good job. And the decision to make her the one that bites the dust and comes back as the possessed killer at the end as opposed to Gage was probably a good decision as we as the audience become a bit more connected to her character.
It’s overall a competently made film, but not a memorable one or a scary one.
Rating: ★1/2
Zero Stars 