Where I Watched It: MAX

English Audio Description?: Yes

As we all know, every Stephen king book-to-film adaptation has been truly flawless. All are classics. Ride The bullet is probably the best of them all. This was my first time watching Pet Sematary in its totality, though I feel like I definitely did the thing we do as kids when the cable edit of a film like this shows up, and we watch a few minutes of something so we can say we saw it. Fake bravery. Honestly? It’s not really that scary, unless you are afraid of poor directorial choices.

This movie follows a doctor who moves to a small town, (which is made even smaller by Pet Sematary: Bloodline, but we’ll get to that), and he has a wife with a tragically unnecessary backstory, a daughter, and young son. Oh, and Winston Churchill. It’s more fun if I don’t give any context to that.

This new family has a kindly old man with a bizarre speech pattern, Judd, who warns the doctor that his house is in front of the world’s busiest truck route. Just in case you don’t get the subtle hints, director Mary Lambert is here to throw a loud-ass semi barreling down the road so many times child protective services should remove the kids from this home. God forbid we just mention his house is in front of a busy road, and have some normal traffic.

Inexplicably, our leading doctor also must encounter a local young man who has been in an accident, who gives him a foreboding warning. Why? He doesn’t know him. It’s so random. It’s even more random when this kid, without any context at all, shows up as a ghost to explain the rules of the film. There’s a pet cemetery behind the house. There’s a normal place to bury the dead, and then a very special plot of land where you absolutely do not want to bury the dead. thank God for random dead teenager to explain the rules. I wonder if he’s the welcoming committee for the town.

After that, Winston Churchill is wandering around in the street of trucks like a dumbass and is hit by one of the myriad of trucks. Perhaps they didn’t see the whites of his eyes. So, because Church is such a valued member of this family, and the doctor isn’t ready to explain death to his kids, he does the very thing the ghost told him not to do. While this is all happening, we experience flashbacks showing his wife’s truly unnecessary backstory.

Honestly, and if Mr. King ever reads this, it’s the most useless backstory. It has no relevance or bearing on the story at all. It’s like having a character who once worked at the North Pole showing up in the Donner party simply because both films feature snow. Sure, this film is about death, and Rachel’s past involves death, but fuck. Don’t most people experience death? It’s not even like Rachel is from this town, and they are coming back to her childhood home where the memories are triggered. She just has this backstory.

I was oddly entertained by Judd. I thought the child actors were well cast. Church seems to provide for a few decent jump scares. But the sound design here, where the echo effect is used to excess, mixed with an almost incompetent screenplay, under the direction of someone who shouldn’t be allowed near a camera, make this a mixed bag.

There’s something in this premise, and how it’s used, at the very core that is solid. But then there’s all this other crap around it, from a bizarre backstory to a bizarre ghost, and a side character with stomach problems, we lose sight of what this film has going for it. The inability to let things go when you love them. Church is an interesting experiment, but it’s what happens after that where the movie can really start to take off.

For an 80’s horror title, it’s about what I expected. I think I enjoyed the whole Judd thing a lot more than anyone else, as I spent most of the movie trying to match his accent. but, whether intentionally entertaining, or unintentionally, it did have its moments.

The audio description does get to come in and clear up the gore, and helps make the jump scares more effective, but it’s also clearly recently recorded on a film whose soundtrack preservation is clearly not a priority. There’s a quality of degradation that is already happening for a 1989 movie, that while subtle, doesn’t help the stark contrast of how well recorded the audio description is.

Final Grade: C+