Pet Sematary (2019)

PET SEMATARY (2019) One-and-a-half stars

I best stay away from the reboots, retcons, or remakes of horror movies for quite some time.

In the case of PET SEMATARY, it actually did meet my rather low expectations.

For the record, it’s the second time in my life that I let a loved one pick the free rental — following M. Night Sham-A-Lama-Ding-Dong’s 2006 epic turd LADY IN THE WATER — and I still feel cheated. There’s an obvious moral lesson to be learned here.

PET SEMATARY lays it on thick, awful thick, with just about every cheap carny trick in the book. I wanted to give up about 20 minutes in, during the death of Victor Pascow in the hospital. That’s when the young man’s brain pulsates from his skull and a nurse exclaims, “Oh my God! I can see his brain!” I stuck it out, although I grumbled something or other about “cheap trick” to my wife not long after the scene.

The plot: Dr. Louis Creed (Jason Clarke) and his wife Rachel (Amy Seimetz) move their family — daughter Ellie (Jete Laurence) and son Gage (Hugo, Lucas Lavoie), plus fur baby Church — from metropolis Boston to rural Maine.

Now, in real life, that’s undoubtedly a good move for everybody concerned. Not in the movies, however, especially any movie based on a best-selling Stephen King novel.

You just know they’re fucked, doomed to a nightmarish saga worse than urban violence. In fact, we needed Crazy Ralph peddling past on his bicycle and screaming “You’re doomed” and “It’s got a death curse” at our young couple.

I know what you’re thinking, that Jason killed off Crazy Ralph long ago, but not if Crazy Ralph was buried in a pet cemetery. I’m just getting a little bit ahead of myself, oh by about three paragraphs.

Thanks to the collective works of King and “Murder, She Wrote,” I have no desire to move to Maine.

The Creeds buy one doozy of a property and I bet it’s listed right next to the Amityville Horror House in Toms River, New Jersey. Once again, the true villain of a horror movie should be the realtor.

Real estate perks for the Creeds’ dream house: A highway seemingly just a step away with semi-trucks barreling down the road all hours of the day (exactly what you’d want for two young children and one pet) and a pet cemetery in your backyard.

Never mind a kindly old man neighbor (John Lithgow) who’s going to lead you straight to your doom.

You’d think you’d rather go back to where you came in the first 10 minutes, right?

All this happens with the utmost predictability, because first and foremost it’s a remake that does not stray too far from the original. We’ve already been down this highway before and one big alteration director Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer and screenwriter Jeff Buhler made was spelled out in the film’s promotion. One of the trailers showed the whole movie in a mere 2 minutes, 26 seconds. PET SEMETARY is yet another movie where I recommend watching the trailer over the actual movie.

Somewhere, in past reviews, I have mentioned how I normally hate jump scares. They’re precisely what I mean by cheap carny trick.

Seasoned movie viewers should be able to detect a jump scare from a country mile away, identifying all the telltale signs.

PET SEMATARY abuses the old standard “It’s Only A Dream” about, just a guess here, 10 times too many.

Abuse is a fitting word for PET SEMETARY.

NOTE: How many times did AutoCorrect change the second half of PET SEMATARY to seminary? Every single time, and I had to change it to the original “incorrect” spelling. However, just think of the possibilities inherent here, for example, “I don’t want to be buried in a pet seminary.”