Harefooted Halloween: Pet Sematary

What I Liked: The story about a husband/father (Dale Midkiff (Love Potion No. 9)) who keeps bringing dead family members back to life is pretty fuckin’ cool.  However you just gotta roll with how they unfold everything and not think about it too much.  If you can do that then you’ll be rewarded with an interesting riff on Frankenstein.

Yet another movie with a killer kid in it.  This one is by far the youngest too at like three years old or some shit.  The combination of the child being preposterously young and the obvious use of a stunt doll in some shots makes this infant murderer comical.  It was impossible for me to take that tiny bastard seriously.  In that regard it was amusing and sorta fun to watch, well up to a point.  More on that in a minute.  And on a side note what the hell’s up with the films I picked this year having adolescent slashers in them?  Such a peculiar trend to accidentally inflict upon myself.

What I Didn’t Like: The acting is not very good all around especially Midkiff who plays it too monotone.  Fred Gwynne (Fatal Attraction) is alright I guess but his exaggerated accent, which I can only assume is supposed to be a Maine one, is incredibly distracting.

Two scenes of “Nooooooooo!”  Once is really pushing it but two?  I’m calling foul.

There’s a bunch of superfluous shit in here like the laundry lady who hangs herself and is never mentioned again, the wife’s backstory involving a sick bed-ridden demon-possessed-looking sister who she hated, the ghost that tries to guide and help the family out at various points but ultimately doesn’t have any real impact on the story and etc.  Maybe this stuff had more meaning or worked better in the book but in the movie it’s thrown in without any thought of why it’s there.

Midkiff doesn’t learn his lesson that he shouldn’t reanimate dead creatures which is very frustrating.  Sure it’s a little funny because he’s such a stupid person but after all the horrific shit he goes through he still doesn’t see anything wrong with putting folks six feet under in that old supernatural Indian burial ground.

Overall Impressions: This was a mixed experience.  On one hand I enjoyed the general premise and how we ramp up from evil dead cat to evil dead person.  It’s a natural progression that you want to see and the filmmakers give it to you.  On the other hand the story becomes predictable which causes Midkiff to come off like kind of an idiot.  Of course whatever you lay to rest in the Indian cemetery, sorry, sematary is gonna come back all fucked up bent on murdering everything in its sight.

And I can’t believe they actually went for the homicidal scalpel wielding toddler full on.  I mean his own father has to take him down making this even edgier.  The whole thing has a Child’s Play feel, particularly Child’s Play 2 when Chucky has that switchblade towards the end, with how relentless and vile the kid becomes.  I wonder if there was any influence but the timeline don’t quite add up so it’s unclear (Sematary book (1983), Child’s Play (1988), Sematary movie (1989), Child’s Play 2 (1990)).  The big notable difference however is one is a doll and one is a human child.

This is a tough recommendation.  It’s so well known that if you’re a horror fan you should get around to checking it out at some point.  If you’re not I don’t know if there’s enough here.  The odder things like the wife’s ghastly sister haunting her and the final twist at the end are completely unnecessary but at the same time kinda neat on their own merits.

Stephen King’s done worse and better.  This one is fairly typical of him in that there are good ideas but he has trouble fitting them all together.