Only an angry cat can save this poor Stephen King remake
Pet Sematary 15 cert, 101 min
★★★★★
Dir Kevin Kölsch, Dennis Widmyer Starring Jason Clarke, Amy Seimetz, John Lithgow, Jeté Laurence, Maria Herrera, Alyssa Brooke Levine
Stephen King thought he’d gone too far when he wrote Pet Sematary. Years before publishing it in 1983 to fulfil his contract with Doubleday, he’d completed the manuscript but locked it in a drawer, worried about a plot involving the resurrection of a couple’s dead child. While King admits the book genuinely scared him, he’s also on record saying he doesn’t believe in the irredeemable hopelessness at its core.
This new adaptation lives up to that hopelessness – it’s very much the work of grave-robbers scrabbling fruitlessly in the dark. On almost every level, it makes Mary Lambert’s 1989 version, which has since built up a strong cult following, look better than it ever was.
That film had a C-list cast and B-movie production values, but it sticks in the mind. The midway death of the infant, Gage, was a genuinely horrific rupture, even if nothing after it could hit home as more than lurid fantasy.
The new film goes south on a similar gradient, but starts from a baseline that’s nudging poor in the first place. Father and daughter (Jason Clarke and Jeté Laurence) get the lion’s share of
attention thanks to an icky daddy’s girl treatment that imports overtones of incest, while bizarre quantities of action simply don’t link to anything. When the Creed family move into a new home with a wilderness out back and a dangerous road out front, the first sign of anything amiss is a masked pagan procession with youngsters carrying a furry body for burial in the woods. (The screenplay just about knows that “Sematary” is a misspelling, but seems to think “cemetary” is correct when Clarke jumps on Google.) Why these masks, and who’s wearing them, we never find out – they’re just generic horror props for later.
The mother (Amy Seimetz) is hung up on death, having witnessed in childhood the horrific decline of her sister Zelda (Alyssa Brooke Levine), whose spina bifida, even before she took a fatal plunge down a dumb waiter, is presented as the most grisly spectacle. Depressingly misjudged, this flashbacky subplot disconnects the helpless Seimetz from everything else, leaving her to go around imagining dumb waiters and tastelessly warped vertebrae everywhere she looks.
The usually solid Clarke does what he can, with a modestly enjoyable John Lithgow as his empathetic neighbour. In a film with such weak connective ideas and merciless underlighting, it all adds up to a miserable viewing experience. The exception is the cat – a run-over moggy much loved by the little girl, which Clarke and Lithgow conspire to bury one night in sacred soil. This four-legged scene-stealer comes back matted, stinking and furious – as well it might be.