Walking down a dirt road, through bushes and abundant trees, you come across a sign. It’s clearly misspelled, you look beyond and see millions of crosses and tombstones. “Lucky”, “Rover”, “Spot”, we all wish they were able to come back to us.
Browsing on Stan again, and taking a co-worker’s recommendation, I watched the 1989 adaptation of the Stephen King novel, ‘Pet Sematary’. Stick to novels, Stephen. While ‘Sematary’ starts strong, foreboding music as children read the tombstones of their own pets, the film quickly nosedives into a black comedy. I’ll admit, I’ve never read a Stephen King novel, but I’ll happily assume that they’re much scarier and serious than this film turned out to be. I couldn’t stop laughing when Louis delivered the line: “It’s thanksgiving day for cats, but only if they came back to life!” and proceeding to talk smack to a dead cat.
Dale Midkiff plays the leading role of Louis in this adaptation, if you’ve never heard of him, consider this film the reason why. I consider Midkiff the Nicholas Cage of Stephen King films, he always either underperforms or overperforms a line. Denise Crosby does slightly better as Rachel, not quite jerking your tearducts but still leagues better than Midkiff. Jud’s actor, Fred Gwynne is easily the best of the bunch, nailing the southern accent, and convincing me in every scene that no matter what he does, he just wants whats best for everyone. While Miko Hughes only has a few scenes as Gage, he certainly did well as a child actor, giving me strong ‘Child’s Play’ vibes every time I saw him clutching that knife in his tiny hands. The cat playing Church in the film was definitely a highlight, initially I recoiled in anxiety, not wanting anything terrible to happen to him, but after the film became a comedy, cheered at his every appearance.
My main criticism with this film, however, is not the dialogue, not the acting, but the lack of animal horror. For a film called ‘Pet Sematary’, it spends a disappointingly small amount of time around pets, the only pet to be resurrected is Church, every other resurrection being a human. One animal only. What if King had just written a cold-blooded dead animal rampage? People fighting on the streets, children crying as they have to watch their dead pets be killed right in front of them, maybe children being attacked by their dead pets?
In general, ‘Pet Sematary’ works gloriously as a dark comedy, a parody of 80s horror films, the tone feels similar to the old ‘Goosebumps’ TV series, but alongside other Stephen King horror films, like ‘Misery’, ‘The Shining’ or ‘Cujo’, ‘Pet Sematary’ ranks dead last for me. Dialogue like ‘Silent Night Deadly Night Part 2’, characters like Cameron Poe and Stanley Goodspeed, but the oh-so-sweet violence and disturbance of ‘Child’s Play’, this film is certainly worth a watch!
Mason’s Ranking: 3 out of 5 stars!
Image Credit: IMDb