Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Welcome to Streamin’ King, a series grave-digging through the myriad Stephen King adaptations available on your favorite streaming services. This time we’re watching Pet Sematary, the 1989 big-screen adaptation of the 1983 novel. Spoiler-light until noted otherwise.
THE GIST: The Creed Family—one cat, two kiddos, the ‘rents—move to Maine, where a wizened local shows them an old-as-hell burial ground for kids’ pets, marked by a misspelled sign, creepy but cute. But behind that’s the Trope-Tastic Ancient “Indian” Burial Ground, the one where Louis, a doctor, will inter his family members after they suffer successively grisly deaths. His hope is they’ll come back for lovely afterlives and he’ll never have to confront death. Somebody didn’t read “The Monkey’s Paw.”
PEDIGREE: Stars Dale Midkiff (a two-season Magnificent Seven show on CBS, um…Air Bud 3?), Fred Gwynne (The Munsters), Denise Crosby (Star Trek: The Next Generation, Ray Donovan), and then-8-year-old Blaze Berdahl (Ghostwriter). Directed by Mary Lambert (a spate of early Madonna videos, 1999’s Pet Sematary II) with a screenplay Stephen King adapted from his novel. At that point he’d penned the original films Creepshow, Cat’s Eye, and Maximum Overdrive (directed that one, too), but had only adapted the super-slim Cycle of the Werewolf (as Silver Bullet) when it came to his own stuff.
WORTH WATCHING FOR CONSTANT READERS? Depends how thick your hate-watching skin is, because when Pet Sematary‘s watched closely and with a working memory of King’s novel/even a light amount of defensiveness for Uncle Stevie’s literary talents, it’s a disaster. It’s good to see old Mainah Jud Crandall come to life in the form of Gwynne and his strong ayuh-riddled takes on the book’s hallmark lines. But the original was a potently bleak meditation on mortality, parenthood, and isolation, and the nuance and intricate bitterness are as missing here as Jud’s wife. This is just an ’80s horror movie; not one of the ’80s horror movies, quality-wise, but just a movie. But even the most off-base King adaptations have their adoring acolytes, so you never know.
WORTH WATCHING FOR KING NEWBIES/AGNOSTICS? If you’re rewatching, because you grew up with it or fell in love with it somewhere along the line, and you still ride with it in 2017, sure, queue it up. If you’re new: “Sometimes, dead is bettah,” as is the case with both housecats and the 1989 movie Pet Sematary by Mary Lambert and Stephen King.
The score is bad, the jump-scares aren’t special. The shots are weak, the recurring POV-in-a-wonky-room effect is a bore, even those iconized Zelda scenes aren’t good, amounting to “man imitates Ozzy Osbourne playing a woman dying of spinal meningitis in a haunted house.”
Pet Sematary‘s stars, Gwynne aside, are ruthlessly bland and tough to swallow; Dale Midkiff sounds the same talking to a dead child as he does…anyone, in any dead-eyed, mayonnaise-mannered conversation. He makes falling out of bed and hitting his face on the corner of the bedstand boring.
BRIEF SPOILERS AHEAD
Midkiff also has mortal faceoffs with a cat and a baby, both of which had notoriously few licensed stunt doubles in 1989. And in the holy name of the god Cthulhu is Jud’s death scene rough! Child’s Play and Pet Sematary were in production around the same time, and if the Child’s Play folks had only had the chance to see this one first, there might be seven fewer Chucky movies in the world.
The brightest point is that truly stomach-pummeling final image, a genuine unhappy ending with gross-out to spare—and even that’s ruined by jolting immediately to the credits with a crashing Ramones track called “Pet Sematary” written for this movie. Just to ruin that ending with.
5 STEPHEN KING TIES, REFERENCES, AND MISCELLANY:
- King makes a cameo as the minister presiding over an early funeral:
- Louis and Rachel are haunted by the ghost of Louis Pascow, who dies early in the film and hangs around to dispense spectral wit and guidance. It’s a device all over King’s work, but particularly notable for our purposes here as it’s so similar to what Netflix’s Gerald’s Game is threaded all through with.
- Pet Sematary is one of the few times King has adapted one of his novels for a feature film, along with 2016’s dreadful Cell and 2014’s not-quite-so-dreadful A Good Marriage. He has more prolifically adapted doorstops like The Stand, The Shining, and Desperation into TV miniseries.
- It director Andy Muschietti and his producer sister Barbara Muschietti want to turn their remake sights toward Ludlow, Maine. “My affection for Pet Sematary will go on until I die,” Andy recently said. “I will always dream about the possibility of making a movie.” In 2015, Guillermo del Toro tweeted that he “would kill to make it on film.” And way back in 2010, 1408 co-screenwriter Matt Greenberg was in the running to direct a remake.
- The idea of an iconic band writing a theme song for a film by Stephen King, the guy whose books feature endless epigraphs by rock acts both real and fictional, is delicious, even if the execution’s a flub.
CRITICAL CONSENSUS: Not great, and not a whole lot that hasn’t been noted already. Empire‘s Kim Newman really killed it, though, writing:
“…King usually writes about cliche subjects so well that you don’t notice the hackneyed aspects of his books, and so when all the character detail, precise backgrounding and elaborate plot setting-up mechanisms are pruned away, all you get is a dumb TV movie with characters doing insanely stupid things to prolong the agony.”
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT FOR PET SEMATARY (1983): Written in peak addict-mode in the mind-blowingly (literally at points, for sure) productive 1980s, published in tandem with Cycle of the Werewolf, six months after Christine. Stylistically and thematically in league with that decade’s darker adventures, stuff like Cujo, Thinner, and Misery.
NEXT TIME ON STREAMIN’ KING: The Netflix original 1922, premiering on Friday, Oct. 20, starring Thomas Jane and Molly Parker, written/directed by Zak Hilditch. Its origin is Full Dark, No Stars, King’s 2010 collection of four deliriously grim novellas.
Zach Dionne is a writer based in North Carolina; he did not completely hate The Dark Tower. Find him on Twitter @zachdionne.
