A weak and unsatisfying script wastes strong performances and high production values in a wayward and manipulative remake of a Stephen King horror classic.
Way back in the Dark Ages–also known as 1983–Stephen King wrote a haunting, complex, and downright creepy book about grief, death, and madness called Pet Sematary. It was made into a truncated and pretty darn cheesy movie in 1989 that reduced this surprisingly challenging novel to smarmy drive-in movie status (no offense, Joe Bob), but managed to appealed to the popular imagination enough that some key moments from the movie–the scowling little boy with the scalpel, the evil, mud-slathered cat, the latter-day Herman Munster intoning “Sometahms, Dead is Bettah”–persisted for decades.
So you can understand Paramount Studio’s desire to dip into that well again, especially in this, The Year of Stephen King (it’s literally hard to keep track of all the King and King Family-related projects that are premiering in the next few months and more are being added almost daily). What we are presented in the new Pet Sematary adaptation, however–in a script from Matt Greenberg and Jeff Buhler, directed by Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmeyer–is a disjointed, confused and pointlessly manipulative mess that wastes some beautiful cinematography and sound editing, as well as the considerable acting talents, most notably young Jeté Laurence and national treasure John Lithgow.
Only the barest bones of the original story are still visible. Pet Sematary tells us about the Creed Family–Lewis the doctor dad, Rachel the wife with no visible career or friends, tennish-year-old Ellie and three-ish-like Gage, who move into a big ol’ house on the edge of the forest near the college town of Ludlow, Maine. Shortly after their arrival, they discover a homegrown cemetery for pets in the land behind their home; soon their new next door neighbor Jud Crandall eventually shows them the cemetery beyond the cemetery, where the animals that are buried in that “sour earth” come back to life…but when they do, they come back real mean. Then when one of the Creed children dies in a horrible highway accident…and one of the Creed parents wants that child back, no matter what the cost…and bad things begin to happen.
