Swanner: Pet Sematary follows Louis Creed and his wife Rachel who are leaving the big city life of Boston for a slower lifestyle of rural Maine. Soon after arriving, they find a cemetery for pets on their property but then come to realize that pass that cemetery is something darker and frightening. Based on a Stephen King novel that proves that maybe dead is better. I’m thinking that maybe if they buried this film in the “sematary” it might come back scarier.
Judd: I read the book in high school, so I barely remember the source material. I saw the 1989 original not too long ago and thought they couldn’t screw up any more than that one. Pet Sematary 2019 set out to prove me wrong. The cast is fine with Jason Clarke (Zero Dark Thirty), Amy Seimetz (Stranger Things) and John Lithgow rounding out the main adults; it’s the direction by team Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer that drive this dud into the ground. Running 1 hour 40 minutes, the movie crawls along at a snail’s pace, with nothing happening until the 1 hour mark.
Swanner. Not only does this film move at a snail’s pace, but it’s not scary. I mean, maybe the last 15 minutes were kind of scary, but overall it felt like an April’s Fool joke. I had heard the early reviews were good, so I went in with great expectation because this has always been a favorite of mine. I was okay with switching which child died, but then I longed for the creepy toddler wheedling the straight razor. Where were the horrible stories of folks who had taken loved ones to the cemetery? How about the half-ass job they did on Rachel’s sister? All sorts of lost opportunities.
Judd: Agreed. Horror movies need to be character driven, like Hereditary, or have all kinds of fun, creepy scares – also like Hereditary. It felt like Kolsch and Widmyer were trying to make a character study out of the father, but they failed. They could have given the daughter an Electra complex earlier in the film, which would have flowed nicely into some of her actions later on. The toddler was completely irrelevant to the plot. The wife was only there to talk about her sister and nag her husband about talking death to their children. There is nothing in the first three quarters of the film that made me want to get to the end. I was pushing my imaginary fast forward button the whole time.
Swanner: I didn’t give a shit about anyone in the family because no one took the time to let us meet them, If I don’t care about your main characters, you got a bigger problem than just a horror film that isn’t scary. The preview promised me redemption from the original version and all it’s flaws, but instead, this film gave me new respect for the original version that actually had me on the edge of my seat.
Swanner: 1 Star
Judd: 1 star
