Pet Sematary Review

One of the most prolific horror authors ever is back on the big screen right now as we have yet another adaptation of one his stories. Yes, we're talking about Stephen King. While I don't think it would necessarily be an accurate statement to say that we're experiencing a Stephen King renaissance since adapting Stephen King stories has always been a popular idea, I will say that 2017's "IT" sparked a huge jolt of energy into the Stephen King brand after it opened to an insane $123 million in September 2017, finishing off its domestic run with $327 million, the highest grossing domestic total ever for a horror film when you don't adjust for ticket price inflation. Just for fun, when you do adjust for ticket price inflation, that honor goes to "Jaws," which made $260 million back in 1975, which adjusts to $1.1 billion with 2019 ticket prices and is the seventh highest grossing movie ever when adjust for ticket price inflation. Following closely behind it is 1973's "The Exorcist," which is ninth place on said all-time list. That tangent aside, what does Hollywood do when something like "IT" makes that much money? The answer is to figure out how to replicate that success. Thus is why, in addition to "IT: Chapter 2" later this year, we now now have our "Pet Sematary" remake.

The first thing about "Pet Sematary" that threw me off is that title. Something about it felt wrong. Then I realized that they spelled "cemetery" wrong. Yeah, I know it's done on purpose. But now my brain is still kinda confused, meaning I now have to think extra hard about how to actually spell it when I want to spell it the correct way. The other more notable thing here is that I had never seen the original "Pet Sematary," which was released in the year I was born - 1989. The book was released in 1983, but I haven't read any of Stephen King's books. It's not out of a lack of desire. I just don't read a whole ton of books. So it goes without question that I also haven't read the book for "Pet Sematary." I could've done some catching up by at least watching the 80's, but I decided to go into this new movie blind. Plus, I hear that 80's movie has a lot of issues anyways, even though it has a solid idea behind it. That's why I was hoping that this remake would fix whatever problems the original movie had by giving us a creepy and intense horror film. That's what the initial teaser promised and thus I was excited and on board. I liked the idea that we had this creepy Stephen King horror movie coming out that I had successfully managed to know almost nothing about. It was a fun level of excitement.

But then the full-length trailer came out and my mood completely changed about this whole thing because they made the decision to spoil all of the secrets behind what this "Pet Sematary" thing was. I was livid and quite frankly no longer excited for this. The idea of going into this mysterious movie having no idea about the mystery surrounding the film was an exciting prospect. On the contrary, having that completely deflated by the advertising of the film was upsetting. Yes, I know. It's 100 percent my fault. The movie has been out for 30 years and the book for 36 years. I shouldn't expect the secret to last that long. And I also could've chosen to not watch any of the additional trailers if I was excited about the idea of not knowing anything about this. But it's still upsetting. It's similar to my experience of watching "The Sixth Sense" for the first time. For some strange reason, that was one of those movies where I had missed growing up and didn't watch until recently. Well, at one point I was browsing around an IMDb board that had nothing to do with "The Sixth Sense" when I happened to stumble upon someone who thought it was funny to spoil the huge twist at the end. It was my fault for not having seen the movie, but I was still mad.

I'm sure you've all had experiences like that. For the record, when I finally watched "The Sixth Sense," I still enjoyed it. But I'm sad that I never got to experience the shock of the twist at the end. With "Pet Sematary," I tried my hardest to still go into this movie excited or at least have an open mind. I don't like judging a movie based on the trailers. I like judging a movie based on the movie itself. And this was one of those horror movies with a high critics score and a low audience score, which is usually gold for me. All the best modern horror movies are trashed by audiences online, so seeing those negative reviews had the opposite effect on me and made me more excited, especially when combined with the good critic reviews. So I went with high spirits, but despite trying my absolute best to be excited or even fake excitement, I was bored to tears for like the first two-thirds of the movie. There was some creepy images, intense music and some attempts at fake jump scares to get me excited. But it wasn't working. I just sat there in my seat waiting for the movie to get to the point, but that's the thing. This is one of those horror movies that takes you by the hand and slowly guides you through the film, spending as much time as humanly setting things up.

If you don't know what "Pet Sematary" is all about, you could already guess that I'm not telling you. There's a family consisting of Jason Clarke and Amy Seimetz playing the parents. They have a young girl and an even younger boy and they make the decision to move from the big city in Boston to a small country town, buying a house in the middle of the woods. Near their house is a cemetery with a lot of pets buried in it and that cemetery has secrets to it that their older neighbor, played by John Lithgow, knows a whole ton about. That's all that I'm going to say. And that's all that the trailers needed to give away. Family moves to the woods and the woods are creepy and mysterious. That's all you need to sell your horror movie. You don't need to give away all your secrets in order to convince people to come see your movie. And there was also no reason to spend so much time building up to the main event. I guess they were going for a sense of realism here. There was a lot of mystical, supernatural stuff going on around this small country town and I suppose they felt the need to properly set things up to make it feel believable. In reality I am aware of the fact that I'm going into a Stephen King movie. I'm more than willing to suspend disbelief here, so this felt pointless.

While it's true that my situation here might be unique since many people have already seen the original "Pet Sematary," the question that kept crossing my mind was that if I was bored after simply watching a trailer that spoiled the main idea behind the movie, what are the people who actually are up to date on their "Pet Sematary" mythology going to think of the idea of a remake to take its sweet time in setting things up? Wouldn't that be a bit boring, too? Now all this aside, I didn't find things in this movie inherently bad. Even though Jason Clarke's character is a bit dull, everyone else was fascinating. Amy Seimetz's character was great as she's feeling haunted by certain things in her past while unsure of their current living conditions despite trying to be as happy as possible. The little boy is cute and the young girl in this movie is a treasure. She's so energetic and flamboyant that she becomes really easy to fall in love with. There was some excellent child acting on her part with a lot of great work by whoever was helping her out. Then we have John Lithgow as the neighbor being so warm and friendly, yet you know he's full of secrets. Thus we have plenty of well-written characters and good performances that it's easy to become invested when the movie finally gets going.

Even though I'm going to avoid specifics of the second half of the movie like the plague, I will say that the horror elements of the film were well-constructed. I always get weary that a horror movie is going to give into endless jump scares or other lazy horror tropes. The movie was sufficiently creepy. The camera work got slightly annoying at times as it purposely misguided you at points while trying to scare you by having the creepy image show up with you least expected it, even though it was super predictable. But outside that, the atmosphere is what really set the stage here. Thus we had a lot of lighting, set design and other elements of the cinematography that made things feel naturally creepy without the need for the music or loud noises to try to trick us into being scared. Instead, the music and sound was used as a tool to help set the tone rather than doing all the heavy work itself. Then we had decisions made by characters that everyone knew was bad, including said characters, but there was enough motivation behind those decisions that you knew why they were made instead of just being dumb decisions because we needed more scary scenes. There were consequences to these decisions that brought emotional weight that felt earned.

When all is said and done, though, I think the movie tried to have something to say, but didn't quite stick the landing for me. One of the many reasons why I've come to like the horror genre is that you can often get deeper and more real with the themes in a horror movie that you can't quite accomplish in some other genres. Not as effectively, anyways. Jordan Peele has done an excellent job at this with both of his horror movies, "Get Out" and "Us" as those movies have a lot to say and use the horror genre to effectively deliver those messages. "Pet Sematary" tries to do this, but I left feeling a bit underwhelmed in that regards. They couldn't quite get there with their message. I honestly think that a big part of this reasons circles back to the fact that they spent so much time setting up these scenarios that they didn't quite have enough time to give satisfying resolutions. Thus if we had fixed the pace a bit and got to the point quicker, it would've allowed for a more deep dive and also would've fixed this problem of me being upset at the movie spoiling too much if what they had spoiled happened a lot earlier in the movie. But I'm still feeling generous enough to give this movie a pass as it does provide a decent thrill to audiences looking for their quick horror fix. My grade is a 7/10.