Previously filmed in 1989, this creepy tale of a family who discover that buried pets in their backyard won’t stay dead is an impressively nasty scare story
“There’s more than one way to bury a cat,” mutters one of the very many traumatised characters in this movie: an uproariously lairy, nasty new version of Stephen King’s uncanny horror masterpiece of 1983, last adapted for the cinema by King himself in the version directed by Mary Lambert in 1989 and now disinterred once again, written for the screen by Jeff Buhler and directed by scare-specialists Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer.
It’s a supernatural chiller about our fear of death - and our longing for death as an end to this fear. This brutally effective and convulsively disturbing story is something to compare with WW Jacobs’s classic Edwardian ghost story The Monkey’s Paw or maybe even Franz Kafka’s stage-play The Guardian of the Tomb, in which the guardian realises his job is not to keep the trespassers out, but the inhabitants in.
Pet Sematary has all the time-honoured and perhaps even cliched tropes of King’s golden age: the creepy kid’s drawings, the sacred burial grounds, the happy family car-journey through deceptive rural loveliness at the very beginning, the habit of stepping outside your house when you hear a strange noise and looking around while incautiously going out far enough to allow some demonic figure to nip into your house unseen behind you. This version of Pet Sematary has iPhones and plasma TVs and Google searches but it could as well be happeningduring the Carter or Reagan presidencies.
from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2UOI1h6
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