Pet Sematary

The things that this 2019 Pet Sematary add to the original may not strictly speaking be improvements, but at least it's not a shot for shot remake, which it was looking like it might have been based on the trailers. A couple of those additions I was not particularly fondof, one's a massive spoiler so I'll let that slide, but the biggest one I knew going into it, 'cause of the trailers, which is: As much as I appreciate John Lithgow, I really wish they had kept this guy (or an emulation of him, I more mean) on as Jud Crandall.

Unrelated sidenote, but when I was young (and I found out about Pet Sematary overall through the Ramones song of the same name) my dad always told me that it was called Pet Sematary and not Pet Cemetary because Americans spelt it that way. That guy lied about... Just everything.

Final rating:★★½ - Had a lot that appealed to me, didn’t quite work as a whole.

Not a patch on the book, and the new ending is awful

This place was thick with spirits; it was tenebrous with them. You could look around and see something that would send you raving mad. He would not think about it. There was no need to think about it. There was no need to –

Something was coming.

Louis came to a total halt, listening to that sound…that inexorable, approaching sound. His mouth fell open, every tendon that held his jaw shut simply giving up.

It was a sound like nothing he had ever heard in his life - a living sound, a big sound. Somewhere nearby, growing closer, branches were snapping off. There was a crackle of underbrush breaking under unimaginable feet. The jellylike ground under Louis's feet began to shake in sympathetic vibration. He became aware that he was moaning.

(oh my God oh my dear God what is that what is coming through this fog?)

Whatever it was, it was huge.

Louis's wondering, terrified face tilted up and up, like a man following the trajectory of a launched rocket. The thing thudded toward him, and there was the ratcheting sound of a tree - not a branch, but a whole tree - falling over somewhere close by.

Louis saw something.

The mist stained to a dull slate-gray for a moment, but this diffuse, ill-defined watermark was better than sixty feet high. It was no shade, no insubstantial ghost; he could feel the displaced air of its passage, could hear the mammoth thud of its feet coming down, the suck of mud as it moved on.

For a moment he believed he saw twin yellow-orange sparks high above him. Sparks like eyes.

_Then the sound began to fade. As it went away, a peeper called hesitantly - one. It was answered by another. A third joined the conversation; a fourth made it a bull session; a fifth and sixth made it a peeper convention. The sounds of the thing's progress (slow but not blundering; perhaps that was the worst of it, that feeling of sentient progr...

A place to bury our pets and remember them. I know it seems scary, but it's not. Perfectly natural, just like dying is natural.

Directed by Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer and written by Stephen King, Matt Greenberg, Jeff Buhler. It stars Jason Clarke, Amy Seimetz, John Lithgow, Jeté Laurence and Hugo and Lucas Lavoie. Music is by Christopher Young and cinematography by Laurie Rose.

Dr. Louis Creed and his wife, Rachel, move from Boston to Ludlow, in rural Maine, with their two young children. Hidden in the woods near the new family home, Ellie, their eldest daughter, discovers a mysterious cemetery where the pets of community members are buried.

Not as bad as I was fearing it would be, but is it really any better than the original film?. Itself a simply ordinary adaptation from what is a very good book, you would have thought the 2019 version would at least bring some fresh life to the story. Yet albeit that some changes have been made (one of which was moronically shown in the trailers), it's still a re-tread that has failed to entice newcomers to this world.

There's some good on show, though. Child actor Jeté Laurence is excellent, particularly in the latter part of the pic. The design for the Pet Sematary and the surrounding areas are splendidly eerie, with photographer Rose deserving a better film really. While the sound work out at the special place is also bang on the tonal money.

The ending has provided much division, but personally it was a change that I liked. Two writers and two directors came up with this adaptation, but they didn't get much right between them and the pic feels like a compromised cash cow. Stick with the book and get The Ramones album of the same name instead. 6/10

I can see why some people would love this. They took all the story, all the characters, all the depth, and crammed it all into all of five minutes, and then upped the action and violence to 11.

The end result was the remake of a horror movie that had some head to it into a horror movie that you don't really need to pay attention to to follow.

In other words, they made it a mindless, soulless, action packed gory mess... unfortunately action and gore without a plot or characters is pretty boring to watch.