Pet Sematary

If any of Stephen King’s books are made into a movie, usually, the result cannot be bad. Except, maybe, when the filming is made by a bungler, the result can be quite a screw-up. What sometimes happens is that an average movie is made from a quality theme, but that depends on the abilities of the makers – or the lack thereof. Pet Sematary, for example, was not filmed for the first time, but I cannot say that there is anything different or unique about it. I think that it is a standard horror movie, which does not even make you scared, because the thought of fear is somewhat turned upside down. Also, it is kind of boring and without the last half an hour, I would probably rate it with even less stars. (2020-01-08)

I received the source material a few months before viewing it and out of the growing stack of Stephen King's books that I have read, this is definitely one of the scariest, if not the scariest, and certainly the most unpleasant, disturbing, and inducing of lingering nightmares. The adaptation logically shortens or simplifies many storylines, which is not a problem as long as it manages to take all the motifs far enough and lets the main characters get where they belong. In this spirit, I easily accept both the change of the central twist and the subsequent shortcuts in favor of tension. However, what I can't accept is the last approximately ten minutes, which, although effectively scary and frightening, are exactly the way the book never was. There a hint or a few glances, actions, and sentences were enough, and this gave rise to the ending, which I consider to be one of the best endings I have ever read. Unfortunately, the adaptation takes the opposite, more action-oriented path, but perhaps because I understand that the film medium is completely different from the literary one, especially in this genre, I am being more lenient in my rating. The mood that settled in my soul for months after reading, namely Jud's message about male hearts that are simply stonier, is also present here, although the viewer must actively seek it out. (2019-07-06)

I decided to watch both film versions made twenty years apart in one afternoon. The comparison didn’t turn out very well for the remake. I found the children's funeral "procession" amusing. Knowing Americans, something like that would be an incentive for another Salem, it smacked too much of pagan rituals that have no place in the most democratic country on the planet. Black Pascow looked as if he had been attacked by an angry Wolverine. I’m not a huge fan of Jason Clarke. John Lithgow, whom I do like, got too little screen time as Jude. I couldn't even enjoy any potential atmosphere, because the creators bet on the dumbest jump scares and the final cover by Starcrawler was a bad joke. (2019-07-30)

Pet Sematary is stuck in the last century and is a routinely-directed showcase of stale resources, with which the creators try in vain to scare the audience, starting with the sinister-looking cat and ending with a funeral procession of children in carnival masks. In contrast to King's book, the film is a very psychologically flat and sparse horror, suffering from the absence of tension, cursed in recurring nightmares of its protagonists, simple grave motifs and obligatory, the cheapest possible jump scares, and without any sign of ingenuity. The film differs only minimally from the previous, thirty-year-old adaptation, as the sporadic changes in the plot suggest that the creators at least tried not to make copy it in its entirety, but (through quality images and contemporary actors) unfortunately, that is where the modernization ends. (2019-04-04)

This is an uninteresting and badly made King adaptation, which perhaps no one wished for anyway, as its existence is unjustified when compared with the honorable thirty-year-old version by Mary Lambert. This movie has no penmanship, no energy. The makers of this did not manage to come up with anything interesting, on the contrary, in the parts where they tried to deviate slightly from the book and introduce something new, the movie begins to be so stupid and tawdry to such an unbearable degree that it is just a smack in the face. The movie therefore fails to evoke any sort of emotion in the audience, there are no surprises, just nothing. Finally, the final smack in the face will come during the end credits, when a cover version of "Pet Sematary" from the original movie starts playing, as if the makers put an underlying message that it is just cool to make a tedious and sexless remake of what used to be good years ago today and we should just put up with it. However, I am not going to. (2019-08-27)