Pet Sematary

Pet Sematary (1989, dir. Mary Lambert) is a bad film.  It’s poorly made in every respect.  The acting is weird and off-kilter.  Only Fred Gwynn, the one “name actor” in the film (he was Herman Munster, and the judge in My Cousin Vinny, 1992) is effective, and mainly he stretches his long narrow and aged face for the camera, looking alternately worried, anguished, or horrified.  The father looks too young and is a dolt of major proportions.  The mother seems histrionic and paralyzed by the memory of her sister who dies of some terrible affliction. Stephen King wrote the novel on which the film is based, as well as the screenplay.  I haven’t read the novel, but the screenplay does nothing for the film.  In brief, a young family (husband and wife, 9-year-old girl, 4-year-old boy) move to a house in the woods to start over.  The husband is a doctor who will work at a nearby college.  Huge trucks drive at high velocity up and down the highway in front of the house.  The many pets who have died on the highway are buried in a “Pet Sematary” near the house.  If you can’t smell trouble coming, you’d better get out of the way. Things take their course, and the family cat is killed by a truck.  Gwynn’s character suggests that the father bury the cat in an old Indian burial site.  Unfortunately, for reasons that must have been as inexplicable to the Indians as they are to characters in the film, bodies buried in the site come back to life.  The cat is resurrected, but its eyes glow, it seems demonically possessed, and it frequently attacks the father.  Other events transpire, and no one survives.  The special effects in this film are crude—artificial fog, a fake rat, body wounds that seem the result of makeup and fake blood, a ghost that fades in and out in the cheesiest way.  The low budget of this 1980s film might alone have ruined it, but there are too many other causes of ruination to list here. 

The most gruesome aspect of this film is the father’s attempt to bring his dead son and wife back from the dead.  The result is predictably gruesome.  But this aspect of the film focuses on a topic that no one wants to think about, and it does so awkwardly.  The demonic 4-year-old with his fake cackling and his father’s scalpel is an unintentionally comic presence in a film that inspires laughter more often than it does fear and dread.

I admire a number of Stephen King’s novels.  His work has resulted in a number of disastrous films (such as this one) it has also produced such excellent adaptations as The Shining (which King hates), Carrie, Stand By Me, and It.  A remake of Pet Semetary is underway.  This is regrettable.  Can it be better?