Review of Pet Sematary (1989) by Stuart M — 19 Aug 2016

Lame. Just super incredibly amazingly lame. A burial ground that brings people back from the dead is a pretty silly idea, but nobody's better than Stephen King at showing how close silliness is to horror.

And yet at every step the film spectacularly fails to even try and hide the stupid. The entire dead coming back to life plot point is revealed by their next door neighbor who insists on burying their dead cat there so vehemently and with such absence of motivation that I was 100% certain he had an ulterior motive.

But apparently he was genuinely trying to help despite the fact that he knew the dead came back evil. Jeez. What follows from there is a series of spectacularly bad decisions where the lead guy decides to resurrect his dead son despite having seen and heard what a bad idea that is.

And then when that leads to his wife's death he does the same for her. It's dark and stupid, a bad combination. And the payoff from all this are the worst monsters of all time: a cat and a baby.

Hardly believable threats. It doesn't help that the lead guy is the worst actor I've ever seen. Or that Tasha Yar herself is just playing a grouchy shrew. A film as bleak as this with no real hope needs something at its core to lift it out of the muck.

This one has nothing.