Tag: Pet Sematary

Pet Sematary (2019)

PET SEMATARY

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.”

Silver Bullet (1985)

SILVER BULLET

SILVER BULLET (1985) Two stars

“It’s such a fine line between stupid, and clever.”

— Spinal Tap lead singer David St. Hubbins

That’s one way to describe the Stephen King adaptation SILVER BULLET, which has left viewers from day one debating whether or not the film makers were intentionally parodying Stephen King and werewolf movies by making so many individual details ridiculous.

Many reviewers just considered SILVER BULLET to be laughably bad and not in the good way, hot on the entrails of previous laughably bad King adaptations CUJO and CHILDREN OF THE CORN.

Watching SILVER BULLET for the first time in many, many years, I must admit the internal split and acknowledge the fine line between stupid and clever.

Let us consider:

— We have a narrator (Broadway standout Tovah Feldshuh) who sounds like an old woman, although it’s only nine years after the main events depicted in the film when she was 15 years old. Feldshuh’s even listed as playing “Older Jane.”

— Gary Busey plays Uncle Red, a womanizing drunkard who dotes on paralyzed prepubescent protagonist Marty Coslaw (Corey Haim), Jane’s younger brother, and makes the boy customized wheelchairs called “The Silver Bullet.” I remembered the second wheelchair most from previous viewings of the film when I was roughly the same age as Marty.

— That second wheelchair, oh wow, just let me tell you that you’ve not enjoyed a complete moviegoing life until you’ve seen the scene where our priest / werewolf (Everett McGill) stalks Marty and his souped-up “Silver Bullet” in broad daylight. Marty’s second great escape is even greater than his first.

— Uncle Red should have pursued a career in wheelchair manufacturing.

— This review gives away the identity of the werewolf. Big deal. The movie tips off the identity almost immediately, but, of course, in a movie like SILVER BULLET, the townspeople are nincompoops and it takes young ones like Marty and Jane to figure out the truth. Those nincompoops are on an epic scale of nincompoop. I mean, it’s tipped off so obviously that “WEREWOLF” should have flashed on the screen below the character. They all should have died.

— The nincompoops form a “Citizens Action Brigade” in the first 30 minutes … after four killings. They load up on guns, load up into trucks, head out into the woods, step into traps, et cetera. Two nincompoops produce one of the great dialogue exchanges from the Planet X. …

Maggie Andrews: What’s the matter, Bobby? You gonna make lemonade in your pants?

Bobby Robertson: I ain’t scared!

— The werewolf resembles a black bear. After the technological advances made in the werewolf movie just four years earlier by THE HOWLING and AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, SILVER BULLET set the species back years.

If they remade SILVER BULLET today, would the original be called a “classic”? Undoubtedly yes, of course, because every old movie remade automatically becomes “classic.” We’ve heard that incessantly about the 1989 PET SEMATARY, for example.

SILVER BULLET, like PET SEMATARY, is not a classic by any definition — “Judged over a period of time to be of the highest quality and outstanding of its kind” or “A work of art of recognized and established value.”

For crying out loud, TEEN WOLF — released a couple months before SILVER BULLET — stands up better.