PET SEMATARY

This isn’t a horror film attempting any level of depth, only one that wants to scare you as quickly and as effortlessly as possible, with at least 60% of the film involving people walking quietly around houses and peeking around doors, and so as the film entered its final act, I found myself so thoroughly bored, able to predict every move it made before it made them and annoyed with it for being so lazy. It also doesn’t help that it seems determined to make cheap and shitty horror icons out of nothing at all (like the idiotic animal masks they add for the pet burials and turning Church into essentially the Annabelle of the film - some evil-looking creature who just sits there and looks pissed off a lot of the time). The actions of the characters are often shockingly idiotic, only adding to its absurdity. They insist on resurrecting those they’ve lost despite the fact it’s very clear it doesn’t work in their favour, something the novel explains at length but the film never does, and as a consequence of this and how poor the writing is, none of the performances bar Amy Seimetz come out unscathed. It’s also poorly made, with sloppy cinematography, an inconsistent visual style, terrible visual effects, a thoroughly predictable score, and no sense of rhythm or drive. Nothing is earned in this film - not a character or an emotional beat or a piece of mythology or a scare - so that even if it wasn’t adapted from preexisting material to compare it to, it would still be an utterly inadequate, maddeningly dumb horror film with no discernible purpose.

As an adaptation of King’s novel though, it’s basically imbecilic. What is so remarkable about the best of King’s work is how, regardless of the supernatural elements he throws into play, his focus is firmly on the characters, their journeys and their inner life. He places the most ordinary of people in the most extreme and extraordinary of circumstances, and allows them to respond based on their human nature. In the case of ‘Pet Sematary’, he explores the intense trauma of grief and loss, and the supernatural aspect of ritual and resurrection is there to serve that theme and allow us to see the extreme lengths we may be capable of in dealing with that grief. The film doesn’t seem at all interested in this, instead removing much of the character detail and just leaving the scary bits, which on their own and without emotional context just seem really stupid. Kölsch, Widmyer and Buhler have completely neutered the novel, stripped it of everything that makes it special and left it an empty pointless husk. It’s more like a Reader’s Digest version of the book, condensed for ease and throughly inadequate. The issue isn’t so much what is changed (the more publicly known change pre-release actually makes a certain degree of sense), but how frivolously it ignores what lies at the heart of the novel.

The finale is almost indiscernible from the novel. That’s fine, great adaptations have come about from these kinds of alterations - especially in King adaptations - but what they’ve replaced the harrowing ending of the novel with is something that makes no sense whatsoever. It’s one thing to end your film in a way that does nothing for your theme or tone or character arcs. It’s another when there’s a perfectly good ending right there that does all that for you. I don’t like to be that person who compares a film to its source material; it should ultimately be judged on its own terms. In this instance though, I found its idiotic reduction of everything that made its source material so special so thoroughly baffling and so thoroughly infuriating.

I couldn’t stand this version of ‘Pet Sematary’. I couldn’t stand it as a horror film, one that, in the wake of popular horror like ‘Get Out’ or ‘The Haunting of Hill House’, still manages to be so idiotic and poorly executed. I couldn’t stand it as a Stephen King adaptation, one that, in the wake of great ones like ‘It’ or ‘Gerald’s Game’, cares more about the creepy shit than the carefully crafted characters and underlying human subtext. Most of all though, I couldn’t stand ‘Pet Sematary’ because it was boring. It assumes so little of its audience's intelligence, goes for the cheapest scares, and doesn’t care whether it makes any sense or not. It’s pure horror confection, but the kind that has melted and reset itself, sickly and stale and ugly. I’d really hoped we were in for another great King adaptation celebrating everything that makes his work so memorable and so affecting. Instead, we just have our first proper contender for the worst film of the year. Sometimes dead really is better.