*** outta *****

3 outta 5

Pet Sematary has some periodic decent thrills but saves the good stuff for the end. Early on, it is a little repetitive by dragging out chills featuring people walking in the murky lighting that inevitably leads to a squealing soundtrack and a bloody vision. A remake of the 1989 movie and based on the novel, Pet Sematary is supposed to be about the disintegration of a family under stressful supernatural visions, like a lot of Stephen King stories. Unfortunately, this doesn’t have the chilling panache that made last year’s It adaptation so very freaky. But this switches up a few things from the original that gives this Pet Sematary an unexpected bite. It just takes a wee bit long to get there.

Moving into a small town away from the big city is Doctor Louis Creed (Jason Clarke) with his wife, Rachel (Annie Seimetz), their daughter Ellie (Jete Laurence) and their toddler son, Gage. They own a sprawling farm estate which even includes its own pet cemetery (misspelled Sematary) where frequent creepy burials for animals are held wherein mourners wear animal masks for some reason.  Their neighbour is the old hermit, Jud (John Lithgow) who tells Louis beyond the cemetery is a land with mystical powers. When their beloved cat is ran over, the parents can’t bear to tell their daughter so Jud and Louis bury it in the spoiled land and the cat comes back the very next day, even though they thought it was a goner. Now with a demon zombie cat being a nuisance, things take a turn for the worse when a loved one is caught in a tragic accident and Louis uses the land’s magical power to bring them back. But, like Jud says, sometimes dead is better.

The beginning spends quite a bit of time setting up the family dynamic and it is sort of annoyingly standard stuff. The couple has an early conversation about if there is an afterlife that is supposed to be ironic with bodies are rising from the grave later. There’re some freaky visions the parents experience in the first half, one cool scene has Louis seeing a victim of a car crash rise and tell vague warnings. It looks neat but doesn’t make much sense since the movie very explicitly says only scary things happen beyond the gravesite.

The mom is given a backstory about how as a kid she had a crippled sister up lived upstairs and, since she was scared to bring her food, she stuffed meals in the dumbwaiter which led to her sister’s tragic death. It’s a pretty hokey story, complete with flashbacks set in the ‘80s (conveyed by some tacky clothing and a bad poster). The fact that anyone uses dumbwaiters is sort of absurd in the 80s and more so now. It does lead to a good scare reveal of the dead sister twisted in the dumbwaiter but the entire notion is just dumb. Also the mom has visions of a bloody overflowing dumbwaiter which seems like a rip off of the iconic bloody overflowing elevator from The Shinning.

Lithgow as the old man who conveys exposition about the cursed land convincingly shows he has the weight of the world on his shoulders keeping his secrets. It takes a chunk of movie for him to say the iconic “Sometimes, dead is better,” line and Lithgow somewhat disappointingly underplays it. The old coot saying dire things is a bit of a thankless role in any horror movie but Lithgow makes it compelling. Clarke as the dad gets to go all dark and depressed which is like a lot of Clarke’s roles.  As the mother, Seimetz mostly looks worried although she in a good bit where she manages to say nasty things to the zombie version of her daughter.

There are some good visuals like when Louis is bringing his daughter to the burial site, he sees something otherworldly hovering in the distance. The funeral procession to the Pet Semetary is very strange looking. The zombie cat hissing and snarling at people with caked blood all over its fur is an unsettling image. A truck accident that causes the death of their daughter has a sense of inevitable dread.  This is sort of a zombie movie and the daughter coming back is when things gets good as Laurence gets to show off a more sinister side when she is the undead. Her line deliveries are nicely creepy and her movement isn’t like a plodding zombie but something otherworldly and fluid. Probably the best moment is when she takes someone out and simply giggles at her bloody handiwork. The third act makes up for the plodding plotting early on as it gets darker and darker. It ends on a final minute of movie that is amazingly bleak and twisted, improving what came before.

There is one horror movie to absolutely see out now in theatres and that movie is Us. Pet Sematary feels a bit more like a throwback considering there’s an entire storyline dedicated to a dumbwaiter accident. But the best stuff in Pet Sematary is when it disposes of sentiment and just goes nasty and bleak, totally committing to the dark tone by the end.