Pet Sematary (1989)

The special effects were bad which isn't entirely surprising since it came out in '89. Like, of course when modern audiences see Victor Pascow disappear and reappear they laugh. But even the practical effects were pretty awful and just lazy. When Missy Dandridge hanged herself you can clearly see the suspension device attached to her shoulders underneath her shirt. Timmy Baterman is seen pulling at his undead flesh in a flashback scene when Jud is telling his story and no flesh comes off. Victor Pascow's makeup/the effect where it's supposed to look like his brain is sticking out wasn't done well and we see him for a lot of the film. The acting in this movie is just... bad. There are a lot of things that bothered me about this movie, but what bothers me most is that they chose a man to play Zelda. And his makeup was the laziest/most disappointing in the entire film. He was not creepy or scary despite trying to be. I don't think the script was awful but some of the lines in this film are just not things people say in real life. And the whole movie just feels so rushed. I think my last review got taken down for talking too much about the novel and the 2019 remake. So, all I'll say is this: If you saw this film without the context of the novel, it's utterly confusing. And I know I'm not supposed to talk about other reviews but I even saw one person who thought Louis was a veterinarian instead of a collegiate physician. With the context of the novel it makes much more sense but it is still executed poorly with an underwhelming cast, very poor effects both special and practical, and a runtime that could have been a bit longer.

"Pet Sematary" is another adaptation of a Stephen King novel. Oddly enough, the cemetery is only incidental to the plot. The real center of the story revolves around an old Mic Mac burial ground located above the pet cemetery in an isolated area.A young family, the Creeds, moves to rural Maine from Chicago. The father, Louis (Dale Midkiff) is a doctor taking up a post at the local hospital (I think). His faithful wife Rachel (Denise Crosby) and their two young children, Ellie (Balze Berdahl) and Gage (Miko Hughes) settle in. They meet their neighbor, the mysterious Jud Crandall (Fred Gwynne) who tells them of a "pet semetary" located at the end of a path leading from the Creeds property.The Creed home and that of Crandall are separated by a busy highway over which travel large trucks at high speeds. The "sematary" apparently was established by the local children to bury their pets that were killed on the highway.At work, Louis tends to the injuries of Victor Pascow (Brad Greenquist). The man dies but in the process vows to help Louis through any crisis, a sort of guardian angel. And yes, only Louis is aware of Victor.When Rachel and the kids go to Chicago for Thanksgiving, Their pet cat "Church" is killed. Rather than tell Ellie of the tragedy, Crandall takes Louis to a hidden graveyard once used by the Mic Mac Indians. The grave yard possess magical powers by which a body buried there will rise (rather quickly) from the dead. Louis buries the cat there and lo and behold, the next evening...the cat came back. The rejuvenated pet has become aggressive toward Louis however, he manages to keep his gruesome secret from his family.Now this is where it gets really interesting. One sunny afternoon at a family picnic, little Gage wanders onto the highway and is killed. After a traditional burial, Louis sends his family to Chicago. Louis distraught over his son's death, exhumes his body and despite warnings from Crandall and Pascow, takes the little boy to the Indian graveyard. The little boy comes back to life and................................A lot of blood and gore in this one folks. The make up on the Pascow character is unbelievable. The violence at the film's climax results in much bloodshed. How they got little Miko Hughes (and his dummy double) to do what they do is really amazing. The hanging suicide of washer woman Missy (Susan Blommaert) although gruesome (and well done), adds little to the story line except to provide a venue for Stephen King's cameo.

The Creed family has a sweet house cat named Church. Unfortunately, it gets run over by a truck and dies. The family's neighbor Jud has a suggestion: Why not bury Church in the mysterious "Pet Semetary", which is hidden near their house? The father Louis Creed dares to do it. And what do you know, the next morning Church is alive and well again. But he does seem somewhat different … Has Louis disturbed the border between life and death? "Pet Sematary" is an allegoric horror flick, based on the Stephen King novel of the same name. The screenplay was written by King himself. That seems promising, but it turns out to be disappointing. The script is fast-paced, but way too preachy, focusing on the trite tagline: "Sometimes, death is better." The message here is painfully obvious, which makes the movie a rather dull affair. I didn't care for the actors, either. Fred Gwynne apparently enjoys his role as the shady neighbor, but he chews the scenery like there is no tomorrow. And Dale Midkiff as Louis Creed is so wooden, you can't get into his character. That's especially true in the last third, where he's acting like a total nut job.Director Mary Lambert saves this movie from being a flop. She treats us with some seriously creepy and gory scenes. But she doesn't always find the right tone. In some parts, you're not sure if you're supposed to wince or laugh. There's an undead sidekick named Victor Pascow. I guess he was meant to be funny, but it's not entirely clear. During the finale, "Pet Sematary" mutates into an exponent of the slasher genre, which is entertaining enough, but doesn't help the story at all. The ending is downright laughable. I enjoyed it quite a bit - on a trash level, mind you.You can get some thrills out of "Pet Semetary", but I can't wholeheartedly recommend it. The story is too crude and the execution too muddled.

"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