Review of Pet Sematary (1989) by Filipeneto — 17 Jan 2021

Although his writing is generally brilliant, not all of Stephen King's short stories are in fact appealing and interesting. As with all authors, there are smaller works in the middle of their writing and "Pet Sematary" is probably one of them. Even so, this did not prevent three adaptations to be made for the cinema. This film, from the late-eighties, is the first of these adaptations and, in my view, the most faithful to the original tale. It is an average film, which does not disappoint us but which is far from being really good.

The script follows King's story with some care: the Creed family has just moved into a country house in order to abandon the stressful routine of urban life, but the house is next to a road with a lot of heavy truck movement, which circulate at high speed and without great care. They immediately become friends with the neighbor across the road, an elderly widower named Jud. It is he who, when asked about a path around the house, introduces them to the Pet Cemetery, where children from the area bury their pets, many of them victims of being run over on the road. Weeks later, when Louis Creed tries to save the life of a young man who dies in his hands after an accident, he is warned by the young man's spirit that he, as well as his family, are in danger. In fact, behind the house, close to the Pet Cemetery, there is an ancient sacred place where the Indians buried their dead, but which was abandoned when it became a cursed place. A place where you shouldn't go, and where the stony soil hides a cruel force.

In general, I liked the film and the story, even though it is considerably weaker than much material I have seen, and which is also based on the tales of this author. The idea of the animal graveyard seems to me more tender than threatening, it is a way to keep alive the memory of the animals we love in life. Furthermore, as the film itself reveals over time, all the horror does not come from this cemetery, but from another, older and more isolated one. The film still has some problems of rhythm since it spends the first 45 minutes in dialogues, back and forth, without actually building solid characters with this effort. In fact, if we exclude Louis Creed, Jud and - surprisingly - the cat, the rest of the characters are limited to the basic and do not allow us to make major psychological analyzes. And that feeling of guilt that Rachel Creed carries because of the death of her sister is something that does not do much for the story told, and it also does not help us to like the character.

The cast is not brilliant, but does a generally satisfactory job. Dale Midkiff was very good in the role of Louis and Denise Crosby is tender as the mother of the family, but Fred Gwynne goes further and really succeeds, with this film, one of the most notable works of the career that, in fact, would end with a few years later. Brad Greenquist gave life to the ghost but if the character was not particularly interesting the same can be said of his work.

Directed by Mary Lambert, it is a lukewarm, irregular film, with a somewhat lazy cast and that suffers from faded, low-contrast and generally ugly cinematography that was taken from the stake in the films of the 1980s. The visual and sound effects are not brilliant, and the sets and costumes are also not particularly surprising, being more or less within what we could expect. Things get much better when the cat comes back, and from now on everything becomes more palatable, bolder and more visually violent. The soundtrack is not in the ear but has good incidental music.