Film Review: Pet Sematary

Released almost exactly 30 years after the first Pet Sematary, fondly-remembered despite dull leads and ‘80s cheesiness, this features a strong cast and a nicely-judged sense of foreboding, but then co-directors Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer have little sense of how to end it. And whereas the book has an uncertain wrap-up and the original pic concluded on a lame downbeat note, here we’re offered something new, different and more than a little ludicrous.

The Creed family are relocating from busy Boston to rural Maine (where King himself famously resides), and Louis (Queenslander Jason Clarke) and Rachel (Amy Seimetz) hope that the quiet small-town community will be good for young daughter Ellie (Jeté Laurence) and even younger son Gage (played by both Lucas and Hugo Lavoie). Louis doesn’t realise that the new house is directly beside a road where huge trucks thunder past, something that’s sure to prove bad news for their beloved mog Church (shortened from Winston Churchill so as to inspire ominous conversations about mortality, death and God).

University doctor Louis can’t save a student named Victor Pascow (Obssa Ahmed) after a terrible accident in a sequence that’s much more graphic than the first film, and Pascow later turns up in Louis’ creepy dreams to warn him of impending doom. Church is then hit by a truck, and instead of letting the poor old puss rest, Louis takes the pet to the famously-misspelled ‘Pet Sematary’ on the edge of the property with creaky neighbour Jud Crandall (John Lithgow, edgier than the kindly Fred Gwynne back in 1989).

Naturally Jud encourages Louis to bury the cat beyond the Sematary in ‘sour ground’, which has something to do with that popular supernatural-movie entity ‘Wendigo’, and Church, of course, returns in freakily hissing and scratching form – or as freaky as he can be given that he’s just a big fluffy tabby that, in reality, would probably lick you to death. And then something truly terrible happens and Louis makes a series of exceptionally bad choices, and while there are some changes here, they’re not that drastic, no matter what purists might say, and are primarily added because family-man King always regretted that infamous plot development.

Moderately disturbing moments are also provided by Rachel’s fairly un-PC childhood memories of dealing with her late and seriously sick sister Zelda (Alyssa Brooke Levine) in particularly nasty scenes, and the directors throw in a glimmer of The Exorcist here and there whenever Zelda pops up to go booga-booga. And there’s no real need for spoilers to say that these Exorcist edges carry on with the treatment of the pre-teen Laurence, who’s called upon to do such unpleasant things that you can’t help but wonder how the kid felt about it all on the set. And her real offscreen parents too.

And yes, that ending? Hisssssss!!!

Pet Sematary (MA) is in cinemas now