Official Synopsis
Louis and Rachel Creed and their two children, an average family who move into an idyllic home in the countryside to begin what promises to be a perfect new life. Unfortunately, their dream home sits next to a pet cemetery with a horrible and dark secret. When a family tragedy causes Louis to become unhinged with grief, he pays a visit to the cemetery and unleashes an unspeakable evil on the world.
I can see why Stephen King was scared of this book (the only book he was scared of in his library of books). The concept of something you love dying and then bringing it back from the dead in an old Native American burial ground is jarring. What’s worse is that when it’s brought back it brings back evil with it. That’s an intriguing plot point and one that is very unique to the horror genre. It’s different because movies that bring dead things back to life generally don’t make it by choice. Having a moral decision to take a dead thing that you’re grieving for, bury it in a mystical burial ground of evil and take the chance of getting back your loved one with sanity intact is quite heavy.
In other words, this plot is absolutely stellar.
Having said that, the acting and the writing were a bit too much. As with Stephen King books translated to film, the dialogue is heavily saturated with unnecessary details. One of the tricks of translating a book to screen is that you have to basically change and quicken your dialogue to match the medium you’re working in. That seems to be an ongoing issue with Stephen King films, sans The Green Mile, where he puts too much detail into the dialogue of characters and it ends up drowning out the scenes. For example, when the late (great) Fred Gwynne’s Jud Crandall is talking about the burial grounds, his dialogue seems to go on forever. Let the visuals do the talking sometimes and not the characters. You get a lot of that in Pet Sematary, which simply doesn’t bode well for a medium like this.
The other issue with this movie is that Fred Gwynne is the best actor in the bunch, which is fine because he’s entertaining. Regretfully, he’s not the main character and Dale Midkiff turns Louis Creed into an unemotional person. He reads the dialogue in the film like he’s a college student giving a speech for the first time. His expressions are nice, but his dialogue delivery less than desirable. He has to lead everything and he doesn’t do a good job of it, which hurts the film a little.
The best actor in the film, and the one that will tug at your heart strings is Miko Hughes’ Gage (the little kid). He’s cute when he’s alive and vicious when he’s brought back from the dead. His last few lines towards the end of the film will make you sadder than someone who bought an HD-DVD player. He really does a great job, and it’s too bad we don’t see enough of him in the film. His return is over much too quickly… which brings up another point; the film is very unbalanced.
The setup of the movie is long and the payoff is short. It’s like watching an action film where you’re building up to this enormous fight at the end, but it only lasts five minutes. That’s how Pet Sematary is balanced. There’s so much build between learning about the evil burial ground, to the tragedy of Church and Gage and then finally the return of Gage. Too much time to get to the top of the mountain, not enough time to appreciate the view.
At the end of the day, Pet Sematary is still sad and pure horror. It will definitely remind you of how good horror movies can be once you nix screaming teenagers and hokey 3D visuals. This is where the good horror was born, and despite its flaws it’s still a fun horror film to watch this time of year.
As for the Blu-ray, it was pretty good, but not great. The locales were really nice in HD, but ultimately there was a lot of graininess that was transferred from the original film. It looked like some of it came from the compression process. It’s certainly not Rain Man bad in HD, but it’s not quite as good as most of the Paramount re-releases that have made their way out recently. The whites/blacks in the movie are quite good, though, so expect a good amount of clean and crisp video in areas heavy with those colors. When gray enters the scene then things get a bit grainy. Again, it’s not horrible, but it’s not great to look at either. There is no color banding in the film and the Blu-ray is very much better than the DVD release. Not to mention, the 3D cover is absolutely badass to look at. Church looks pretty darn vicious on it.
I want that cat for my house, but he has to have red eyes.
Anyway, the audio comes to you in DTS-HD 5.1 and the movie will fit nicely in fullscreen (not the actual ‘fullscreen’) on your HDTV.
Finally, as for features, here’s what you’re looking at:
– Commentary by director Mary Lambert
– Stephen King Territory
– The Characters
– Film the Horror
Not a lot here, but considering the release is only $22 ($19 on Amazon), it’s actually nice what they’ve included. The Stephen King Territory is very interesting, as it guides you through his inspiration for the book and what he required for the film to be made. The commentary is good, the characters are very good and the ‘film the horror’ is quite fascinating. All in all, there are some solid features here, just not in abundance.