E's Reviews: Pet Sematary (2019)



So...Pet Sematary.........sigh....


PET SEMATARY (2019) was directed by Kevin Kölsch, Dennis Widmyer, and stars Jason Clarke, Amy Seimetz, and John Lithgow, and is about Dr. Louis Creed and his wife, Rachel, who relocate from Boston to rural Maine (not Derry...but it could be Derry...) with their two young children. The couple soon discover a mysterious burial ground hidden deep in the woods near their new home. But beyond the burial ground, the land is sour...and sometimes...dead is better. OOOoOOOoOO SPOOKY!!! Yeah, this is gonna be one of those reviews, where I just go off and rant like a crazy person or something...I guess...but let's go through the technical stuff before I go off on a tangent and lose my mind.

The bad...and there is a bit of bad...For starters, there's an intriguing mythological element to this movie that just never gets fully realized. They could've just said "screw the book" and created their own adaptation of the novel. But instead, we get this interesting thing that just...it just never freaking appears in the movie. It would've been so damn cool to see it (and I won't ruin that here). The editing kind of threw me off a bit, too. There were just a few too many cuts in the action that I was like "Oh, okay...I guess?" Then the fact this family is haunted by death seemingly everywhere, without explanation, is kind of messy. This script needed so much more work to become something that really could have been a classic retelling of a film that, to this day, still stands up as one of the more terrifying Stephen King adaptations ever made. Too...much...green...screen....

As for the good...there's something about Jason Clarke I enjoy watching on screen. He's a tremendously talented actor that for one reason or another, ends up in bad movies (Winchester, Terminator: Genisys). He's extremely talented and he deserves better. The child actors were great, especially Jeté Laurence who gets downright creepy. Oh, and speaking of creepy, there's a LOT of jumps and intense sequences to this film. There's even a fair amount of blood and gore to keep the die hard horror fans invested. I felt myself looking away a few times (right at the mom and her two small children sitting next to me...does she know this is rated R?) The cat, Church, was amazing to see on screen. This new version was grotesque yet beautiful (the cat, not the movie). John Lithgow is fine, but he's been better (Rise of the Planet of the Apes for starters...everything with him in it made me cry...) There was some interesting cinematography that I feel should've been used more; the woods seeming eerie, like some place you weren't meant to go...but they didn't use it the entire time...opting for green screen like...c'mon guys...

Now for my rant...seriously, this movie needed like 20 more minutes of exposition and maybe some explanation into the whole "sour land" bits (including the mythology part...like go deeper, not just surface level...) and it would've made this way better. Yes, the scares are there. The acting is fine, there are some spooks and some twists, but c'mon...I expected better. I expected a movie with a massive budget like this got (compared to the original adaptation), to be bounds and leaps better than the original. Instead we get LOUD F*CKING NOISE JUMP SCARE OH MY! and a few disturbing visuals, some fake blood, CGI where we didn't need any, green screen forest (WHY?! WHY THE F*CK WOULD YOU DO THAT WHEN YOU HAVE A F*CKING FOREST RIGHT F*CKING THERE!?!?!?), etc. and that's Pet Sematary (2019). I mean...it's fine, it's not terrible, the acting is definitely it's strong suit, but ultimately a forgettable film for me.

I implore you to check it out yourselves and form your own opinion on it, maybe you'll like it better than I did. It's in theaters now.

Final Score: 6/10

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