Pet Sematary (2019)

Stephen King's novel Pet Sematary has been made into a movie before once way back in 1989. I have some vague memory of the reading the novel and watching the earlier movie. However, I cannot remember it well enough to make any comparison with this latest big screen adaptation. The underlying theme with Pet Sematary is how we deal with death and the ageless question on what happens when someone or a living creature dies.

I love horror movies and especially have my expectations heightened if it is based on a Stephen King novel. The main character here is a young doctor who moves his family to a small town to get away from the stress and hectic life of the big city. A typical premise for a horror story! In place of the usual haunted house we get a mystical graveyard where the buried dead comes back alive. Stephen King had actually created some complex characters here carrying some morbid dark history or secrets, and a doctor that does not believe in life after death. However, despite the creepy story and plenty of opportunities to freak audiences out, the movie has taken the "safe" approach and comes off as predictable and unimaginative. Instead of playing on the conflict of beliefs of the main characters and how they struggle with their choices, we get the usual cheap jump scares. The cast of mainly unknowns was competent but were not given the opportunity to go beyond the standard acting. John Lithgow was wasted in his supporting role. It is surprising to find that the movie needed TWO directors to end up with this unimpressive result. This movie has failed to live up to the recent Stephen King adaptations and I would say it should not have been remade if the producers were not willing to put in a special effort to make it different and worthy of the novel. Makes me feel like rewatching the 1989 version to see if that was a better adaptation.