Pet Sematary

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. (08/27/2019)

A routine flick without a clear-cut concept that might amuse some non-discerning popcorn-eating teenagers (it contains both jump scares and gore), Pet Sematary will disappoint or anger fans of the original book, as well as thinking fans of the genre. It has some powerful moments (the mom being hugged by her daughter) and nice visuals (the burying ground), but it is also lethally dumb and, what’s more, it lacks any kind of director’s vision along the lines of “I want to preserve the original character of the book by making it into an equally interesting film adaptation”. The cast is alright, the familial ties and the initial atmosphere of the chilling locations work, but all of that is undermined by the further development of the movie. (04/18/2019)

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. (04/05/2019)

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. (07/30/2019)

I'm not an uncritical King fan, yet I gave the new version of Pet Sematary a chance. Sadly, King adaptations will probably never get out from under their shadows again. It's still all about there being one better film for every twenty crap ones, and really only rarely is there a work worthy of the viewer's remembering. That's how I fondly remember Carrie and Misery. A lot of the other films were bad. (12/31/2019)