Seemingly normal American family (Dale Midkiff, Denise Crosby, Miko Hughes, Blaze Berdahl) move to rural Maine so Midkiff can set up his medical practice. Things seem happy for a while, until the family cat gets hit by a car on a notoriously dangerous stretch of road. Friendly neighbour Judd Crandall (Fred Gwynne, who should’ve done more films) directs Midkiff to a nearby ‘Pet Sematary’ (Hence the misspelled title), for all the road kill from the area. He tells Midkiff that just beyond the cemetery is an old Indian burial ground, and if he puts beloved ‘Church’ to rest there, the cat will return. And so he does, and so the cat indeed does return. The cat is not quite the same, though, as Judd is known to say; ‘Sometimes dead…is better’. And soon tragedy befalls another member of the family, and grief-stricken Midkiff thinks about doing the unimaginable.
Time has been fairly kind to this Mary Lambert (who cut her teeth doing the controversial video to Madonna’s best song, ‘Like a Prayer’) directed screen adaptation of the Stephen King novel. With decades of hindsight and many bad King adaptations behind, one has to say this is nowhere near the bottom of the list. What keeps it from being a total success are dull lead performances by Midkiff (Bruce Campbell would’ve nailed the role effortlessly, and was indeed first choice) and Crosby (and a horrible one by little Berdahl) and a failed subplot concerning a reanimated/ghostly corpse (Greenquist, with unconvincing makeup) that rips off the best part of ‘An American Werewolf in London’ minus the humour (and minus the impact).
Otherwise it has a darkly amusing sense of humour (and King’s patented cruel streak towards animals, most vehemently shown in ‘Sleepwalkers’ and ‘Cujo’), and top performances by Gwynne (TV’s Herman Munster as the perfect blend of avuncular and unsettling) and a startling young Hughes (one of the all-time best kid actors IMHO, and he was only three at the time!). Crosby’s childhood story involving her ill/deformed sister (played by a heavily made-up male actor, Hubatsek) is particularly hilarious, and really sick stuff. King is a very warped man indeed.
I gotta give Lambert and King credit for going all-out with the morbid humour (a funeral scene involving a casket being knocked over and a punch up, etc) and some pretty controversial acts of violence here. A shame the FX are so uneven, the budget being around $11 million. Nice cinematography by Peter Stein (‘Reuben, Reuben’) featuring some terrific night-time shots of a foggy forest with dark blue backlighting. Screenplay by King himself (he amusingly turns up in a cameo as a preacher), supposedly fairly faithful to his source. Title song by The Ramones is rather dull, actually.
OVERALL SUMMARY
Not for animal lovers, and absolutely not for children- it will likely scar them for life! Not everyone will get this, but I didn’t think it was bad and often appreciated its grisly and morbid sense of humour.
