Pet Sematary

This is an uninteresting and badly made King adaptation, which perhaps no one wished for anyway, as its existence is unjustified when compared with the honorable thirty-year-old version by Mary Lambert. This movie has no penmanship, no energy. The makers of this did not manage to come up with anything interesting, on the contrary, in the parts where they tried to deviate slightly from the book and introduce something new, the movie begins to be so stupid and tawdry to such an unbearable degree that it is just a smack in the face. The movie therefore fails to evoke any sort of emotion in the audience, there are no surprises, just nothing. Finally, the final smack in the face will come during the end credits, when a cover version of "Pet Sematary" from the original movie starts playing, as if the makers put an underlying message that it is just cool to make a tedious and sexless remake of what used to be good years ago today and we should just put up with it. However, I am not going to. (27/08/2019)

A routine flick without a clear-cut concept that might amuse some non-discerning popcorn-eating teenagers (it contains both jump scares and gore), Pet Sematary will disappoint or anger fans of the original book, as well as thinking fans of the genre. It has some powerful moments (the mom being hugged by her daughter) and nice visuals (the burying ground), but it is also lethally dumb and, what’s more, it lacks any kind of director’s vision along the lines of “I want to preserve the original character of the book by making it into an equally interesting film adaptation”. The cast is alright, the familial ties and the initial atmosphere of the chilling locations work, but all of that is undermined by the further development of the movie. (17/04/2019)

I haven't read the book, and I wasn't too impressed with the 80s movie, so I'm pleasantly surprised here. For the first time in a while, a mainstream horror film that doesn't try to be weird and controversial, but is very audience friendly (there are jump-scares and even blood), so as pure horror entertainment everything is on point here, as it should be. The actors are decent and there are thankfully no illogical missteps, visually it's an inoffensive standard and the horror scenes are effective. The finale is nicely atmospheric and uncompromising and the denouement is certainly a surprise. I'm satisfied. 80%. (07/04/2019)

I received the source material a few months before viewing it and out of the growing stack of Stephen King's books that I have read, this is definitely one of the scariest, if not the scariest, and certainly the most unpleasant, disturbing, and inducing of lingering nightmares. The adaptation logically shortens or simplifies many storylines, which is not a problem as long as it manages to take all the motifs far enough and lets the main characters get where they belong. In this spirit, I easily accept both the change of the central twist and the subsequent shortcuts in favor of tension. However, what I can't accept is the last approximately ten minutes, which, although effectively scary and frightening, are exactly the way the book never was. There a hint or a few glances, actions, and sentences were enough, and this gave rise to the ending, which I consider to be one of the best endings I have ever read. Unfortunately, the adaptation takes the opposite, more action-oriented path, but perhaps because I understand that the film medium is completely different from the literary one, especially in this genre, I am being more lenient in my rating. The mood that settled in my soul for months after reading, namely Jud's message about male hearts that are simply stonier, is also present here, although the viewer must actively seek it out. (06/07/2019)

I can't say I was directly expecting it, but Pet Sematary is a great honest-to-goodness horror film. It takes the essentials from King's premise, and isn't afraid to play with them in such a way that the result is surprising even to someone who knows it, yet the outcome remains 100% King. During a few scenes there was a completely sepulchral silence in a reasonably full theater, which I think says it all. I cared about the characters and as time went on I became uncertain of almost everything and enjoyed it immensely. Jason Clarke fits the role perfectly and I enjoyed him as much as John Lithgow, the music by horror expert Christopher Young is also good, you hardly notice it while watching but it's worth a separate listen. I'm just supremely satisfied, despite the fact that I was looking forward to the Frankenstein madness of the book and got something completely different (but just as good). It all culminated in an extremely tense finale in a misty graveyard... and the ending! It wasn't a Stephen King ending, it was a Richard Bachman ending! (13/04/2019)