Paramount Pictures
In 1983, Stephen King produced the disturbing horror novel Pet Sematary which warned that messing around with an Indian burial ground was not such a good idea (see also the movie Poltergeist). In 1989, Paramount Pictures produced a movie based on the novel that kept the basic plot intact but slightly altered the ending (it’s success even managed to spawn a less than successful sequel). I remember seeing the original with a group of co-workers opening weekend after work, and it was scary fun with the really disturbing imagery of a homicidal three-year-old. And because apparently there aren’t any other Stephen King novels to be turned into movies, Paramount has gone back to the well … or perhaps burial grounds … to resurrect Pet Sematary just as Louis Creed did with the family cat Church.
If you’re unfamiliar with the novel or the original movie, the basic storyline focuses on the Creed family, newly moved to Ludlow, Maine from Boston (Chicago in the original) to get away from the rat race of the big city. Louis is a doctor at the University of Maine and his first day on the job offers the victim of a horrific accident, Victor Pascow, who dies from his injuries but keeps appearing to Louis as a ghostly vision. The family, particularly daughter Ellie, has made a fast friendship with neighbor Jud Crandall, and when the family’s cat Church is killed by a truck Jud offers to help Louis bury the cat before Ellie finds out, planning to use the story that Church ran away to console her. But Jud knows Ellie loves that cat more than anything else, so he takes Louis past the ‘Pet Sematary’ in the forest (which Louis finds out is on their newly purchased property) to an area on the other side of a large deadfall, which Louis learns later was built to keep people out of that area once occupied by an Indian tribe which left because the ground was ‘sour’. Next thing you know, Church is back but with a decidedly different personality that frightens Ellie. Not long after, Ellie is killed by another truck (they speed past the Creed property) and a distraught Louis exhumes her body while his wife and young son away in Boston and reburies her, waiting for her return. Like Church, Ellie is not quite who she was, setting up the horror to come.
Now this is a little spin on the original film and novel as the young son Gage was the reanimated child, which made the movie all the more disturbing. Not sure why they opted to make the change to the older child but the change does lead to an ending that leaves the audience with a sense of ‘oh, they are not going there, are they?’ … which is probably the most horrifying part of the movie.
As it stands, the new Pet Sematary offers few real scares — aside from one moment that had many in our audience yell out — if you’ve seen the original. Perhaps newcomers to the story will find it more terrifying but for me the original is more scary (even if I completely forgot Ellie was in that film as well, as was the flashbacks to Rachel Creed’s childhood when she was forced to take care of her sister who was suffering from spinal meningitis, the experience traumatizing Rachel into adulthood) because three-year-old Miko Hughes was so good as Gage. Not to take anything away from Jeté Laurence who plays Ellie in the new movie. She does a really good job of giving us two different sides of Ellie, and some subtle CGI makeup used on her face after the resurrection adds to the effect.
It’s difficult not to compare the new to the original especially for the role of Jud. Now, John Lithgow is fine but he just doesn’t make me feel like he’s lived in the Maine countryside for his entire life. Fred Gwynne in the original really nailed the part and made everyone forget his most famous role, Herman Munster. Here I just see John Lithgow. Jason Clarke, who is not one of my favorite actors, is also fine as Louis but I just had a hard time connecting to him emotionally. Amy Seimetz has the thankless role of Rachel, spending more time reacting to her memories than anything else going on around her, and then is shuffled off to Boston for a large portion of the movie.
The movie is directed ably by Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer, who refrain from falling back on loud audio cues to make the audience jump. If I have any complaints about the film’s production, there is a lot of time spent on Jud explaining the legend of the burial ground to Louis including the existence of an ancient spirit known by the locals as a Wendigo. If I remember correctly, we did see the Wendigo in the original film but here all we get are some unearthly sounds off in the forest surrounding the burial ground. If you’re going to bring up this element of the story, it would be nice to show it. That being said, the sound design for the movie is pretty spectacular with the sound editors taking full advantage of the theater’s multi-channel sound system. The audio component of the movie, with sounds coming from various parts of the theater, was almost more chilling than anything on screen.
Overall, Pet Sematary is just fine, perhaps better experienced with a large audience reacting to the film, never achieving the scare quotient of the original but the movie barrels to an ending that almost makes it all worthwhile.
Pet Sematary has a run time of 1 hour 41 minutes and is rated R for horror violence, bloody images, and some language.
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