Pet Sematary

It's like someone has been reading my reviews of contemporary horror films for the last five years. And didn't much care for me. Who are these people I'm supposed to be worried about? What are they into? Why should I care about their hardships? Is it really that hard to make a horror movie set in the woods and actually shoot it in the woods? Does it really not bother anyone that the night exteriors look like a digitally rejuvenated Russian studio fairy tale from the 80s? Don't tell me it never once occurred to any of the filmmakers that a camera with a high frame rate looks absolutely dreadful in a horror movie. I know you like how fast and easy it can refocus, how many colors it captures, and how monumental the resolution is, but watch that shot of Jason Clarke running to get his daughter after the collision with the truck, for example. And then watch it again. And then shoot yourself. Do it! Personally, I'm not much of a King fan, but at the same time I know he hates his characters and thinks they're jerks. But even he seems to be struggling to show the motivations behind their seemingly moronic decisions. Here, the characters are constantly acting like they've pressed a self-destruct button. Apparently there are some literary explanations to the reasons for their behavior. They still can't be divined from the film. The reason is that it's awfully poorly shot, dreadfully written, and the people there don't really know how to act. But, hey, it’s got jump scares! Yay. They're great, there's about 200 of them, and when a frog croaks in the silence, your hair falls out. A fast-moving truck only makes a sound within a one-meter radius, and besides, if you discover the key to how they work, you've got it made, because it always means the scene is suggesting something's going to pop out from one side, but then it pops out from another! Heavens preserve us! (2019-07-09)

Pet Sematary is stuck in the last century and is a routinely-directed showcase of stale resources, with which the creators try in vain to scare the audience, starting with the sinister-looking cat and ending with a funeral procession of children in carnival masks. In contrast to King's book, the film is a very psychologically flat and sparse horror, suffering from the absence of tension, cursed in recurring nightmares of its protagonists, simple grave motifs and obligatory, the cheapest possible jump scares, and without any sign of ingenuity. The film differs only minimally from the previous, thirty-year-old adaptation, as the sporadic changes in the plot suggest that the creators at least tried not to make copy it in its entirety, but (through quality images and contemporary actors) unfortunately, that is where the modernization ends. (2019-04-04)

I decided to watch both film versions made twenty years apart in one afternoon. The comparison didn’t turn out very well for the remake. I found the children's funeral "procession" amusing. Knowing Americans, something like that would be an incentive for another Salem, it smacked too much of pagan rituals that have no place in the most democratic country on the planet. Black Pascow looked as if he had been attacked by an angry Wolverine. I’m not a huge fan of Jason Clarke. John Lithgow, whom I do like, got too little screen time as Jude. I couldn't even enjoy any potential atmosphere, because the creators bet on the dumbest jump scares and the final cover by Starcrawler was a bad joke. (2019-07-30)

I can't say I was directly expecting it, but Pet Sematary is a great honest-to-goodness horror film. It takes the essentials from King's premise, and isn't afraid to play with them in such a way that the result is surprising even to someone who knows it, yet the outcome remains 100% King. During a few scenes there was a completely sepulchral silence in a reasonably full theater, which I think says it all. I cared about the characters and as time went on I became uncertain of almost everything and enjoyed it immensely. Jason Clarke fits the role perfectly and I enjoyed him as much as John Lithgow, the music by horror expert Christopher Young is also good, you hardly notice it while watching but it's worth a separate listen. I'm just supremely satisfied, despite the fact that I was looking forward to the Frankenstein madness of the book and got something completely different (but just as good). It all culminated in an extremely tense finale in a misty graveyard... and the ending! It wasn't a Stephen King ending, it was a Richard Bachman ending! (2019-04-13)

This is an uninteresting and badly made King adaptation, which perhaps no one wished for anyway, as its existence is unjustified when compared with the honorable thirty-year-old version by Mary Lambert. This movie has no penmanship, no energy. The makers of this did not manage to come up with anything interesting, on the contrary, in the parts where they tried to deviate slightly from the book and introduce something new, the movie begins to be so stupid and tawdry to such an unbearable degree that it is just a smack in the face. The movie therefore fails to evoke any sort of emotion in the audience, there are no surprises, just nothing. Finally, the final smack in the face will come during the end credits, when a cover version of "Pet Sematary" from the original movie starts playing, as if the makers put an underlying message that it is just cool to make a tedious and sexless remake of what used to be good years ago today and we should just put up with it. However, I am not going to. (2019-08-27)