SummaryAfter relocating with his wife Rachel (Amy Seimetz) and their two young children from Boston to rural Maine, Dr. Louis Creed (Jason Clarke) discovers a mysterious burial ground hidden deep in the woods near the family's new home. When tragedy strikes, Louis turns to his unusual neighbor, Jud Crandall (John Lithgow), setting off a perilou...
SummaryAfter relocating with his wife Rachel (Amy Seimetz) and their two young children from Boston to rural Maine, Dr. Louis Creed (Jason Clarke) discovers a mysterious burial ground hidden deep in the woods near the family's new home. When tragedy strikes, Louis turns to his unusual neighbor, Jud Crandall (John Lithgow), setting off a perilou...
Although the changes to the source material are guaranteed to polarize some Stephen King fans, Pet Sematary bucks the remake trap of simply paying homage to an iconic piece of horror. Instead, it makes drastic changes to the plot so it can ultimately go more complex with its themes. That’s a hell of a trick to pull off. Sometimes, different is better.
Es extraño, siempre sentí aversión hacia esta película y cuando intentaba verla la paraba a los 15 minutos porque estaba empeñado en sentir rechazo absoluto, pero hoy en pleno aburrimiento decidí intentar verla nuevamente y de manera inesperada me gustó mucho, es oscura, siniestra y mas densa que la adaptación de 1989, incluso las actuaciones son mejores, quizás no sea igual de aterradora pero al menos para mí la historia en esta nueva adaptación fue más profunda y mejor desarrollada, y si vamos a comparar ambas versiones, las dos son buenas, pero personalmente me quedo con la actual.
Antes de que mi comentario genere discrepancias, la versión de 1989 recibió peores críticas que esta, la cual fue más polarizada pero equilibrada al mismo tiempo y no solo por los críticos, sino que también por los espectadores.
For as impressive and smart as the film is throughout, the weightlessness to the drama keeps it just out of arm’s reach of films that masterfully examine loss like “The Changeling,” but the craft at least firmly plants it in the upper-tier of contemporary horror remakes.
Pet Sematary is beautifully acted, suspensefully paced, competently staged, and overall is pretty successful at delivering that chilling sense of unease and redolent grossness that the best adaptations of Stephen King’s horror stories do. Yet its departures from the source material and from the previous, 1989 adaptation are lateral moves at best, and its capacity to ultimately deliver on the promise of its premise is middling — though not any more so than in the book or the previous adaptation.
Fun? That’s the word this production’s team never learned. But again, getting the dead cat makeup (it rarely looks digital, if indeed it was) right seems like the top priority.
With Pet Sematary, it seems like the remake was ordered, and the filmmakers tried unsuccessfully to come up with a reason. Sometimes less is better too.
I’m a pretty easy scare, but I sat through this Pet Sematary mostly unbothered. Which is certainly not the takeaway one should have from an adaptation of a Stephen King novel, let alone the one that King has said frightens him more than anything else he’s written. In this new film, you almost can’t see what he was so afraid of.
A remake with technical and visual improvements, but that's basically it.
Although his writing is generally brilliant, not all of Stephen King's short stories are in fact attractive and interesting. As with all authors, there are smaller works in the middle of their writing and "Pet Sematary" is probably one of them. Even so, this did not prevent three adaptations from being made for the cinema. This film is precisely the third on the list, and the most recent, being a remake of the first, made in 1989. Personally, I found the original film average. It presents several improvements, mainly at a technical level thanks to the most modern technology and methods. But honestly I have some reservations about the script.
Being a remake, the script is very similar to the film of the Eighties: again, we have the story of the Creed family again, who moves to the quiet city of Ludlow, Maine, in order to disconnect themselves from the tiring routine of the great City. What they did not expect was that the road in front of their new home had so much truck traffic, which circulated at high speed and without much care. Nor did they expect to find an animal graveyard behind the house, which is presented to them by a friendly neighbor, Jud. The cemetery is a place created by the children of the surroundings, to bury their friends, many of them run over on the road. So far, nothing special. Weeks later, when Louis Creed, a doctor and family patriarch, is unable to save the life of a young man who dies at his hands after an accident, he is warned by the spirit of that same young man that he, as well as his family, are in danger . In fact, behind the house, there is also an ancient sacred place where the Indians buried their dead, but which was abandoned when it became a cursed place. A place where you shouldn't go and where the stony soil hides a cruel force, which Louis will discover over time.
The script is very similar to the 1989 film, and there are scenes that were even traced on carbon paper. However, besides this not being exactly original, it also makes the film predictable and boring for those who saw the oldest film. Of course, there are modifications here and there: at least one of the characters in the original film was removed and the script tried to put more emphasis on the character Rachel Creed, developing her traumas and internal conflicts to increase tension. These were positive changes, but on the other hand, the film does not seem to have much feeling: in the 1989 film, I felt that the film was creating an atmosphere of tension and suspense that worked satisfactorily. That was less noticeable here, and it's a shame, because then the film is not able to scare anyone.
The cast is decent, but it is not brilliant. The young Jeté Laurence, for me, was the actress who stood out the most, with a remarkable ability to act as an innocent and friendly girl and, quickly, turn into a totally different thing. Jason Clarke seems to me to be well enough, but he was not able to do better than Dale Midkiff did in the Eighties, in the same character. Amy Seimetz initially seemed quite bland, but it improved as her character became more neurotic and traumatized. John Lithgow did a satisfactory job, but no more.
At a technical level, the film is reasonably more appealing and interesting than its predecessor of the Eighties. It couldn't be any other way. Cinematography is frankly good, but still within the standard of today's films, with nothing that really surprises us. The visual and special effects are good, and the sets and costumes don't surprise us much. The look of animals and people who come back to life after dying was very well thought out and really leaves no doubt as to the perverse nature of what they become. The CGI effects were used discreetly, as well as the soundtrack, which is not noticeable.
The eerie but occasionally weak starting points leave one tired of the predictability. But although the development of the plot becomes tolerable, which is certainly only Stephen King's doing, and the performances are especially the highlights, Pet Sematery ultimately digs up its own grave by failing to deliver on its narrative, leaving the natural ending unfitting.
I’ve never read the original novel nor watched the 1989 film but man was this bland. This film is barely over an hour and a half but it feels like two. Pet Sematary is an incredibly boring film. There were aspects I liked about the film but they get buried under this snooze fest. Most of the acting is pretty bad except from Jason Clarke and John Lithgow. Both do a good job but they don’t really bring anything new to the table. Jete Laurence and Amy Seimetz were pretty bad in this film. Clarke and Lithgow were able to make the terrible script work for them but Laurence and Seimetz fell victim to it. It also doesn’t help that their characters aren’t that great and aren’t fleshed out a lot. The make-up effects are pretty great when they are used but they aren’t used in scenarios where they should have been used. If someone gets hit by a huge trailer there probably should be a little bit of blood not no blood at all. It removes all tension from the scene. They could have just shown some blood and no body. They would have left it up to the imagination of the viewer to think about what that person's mangled body looked like. The music and cinematography are incredibly bland and generic. The music sounded like stock horror music and the cinematography was basic and boring. The film has a swamp set that they decided to use a green screen background for and it’s really noticeable. The editing is not terrible but it’s not good either. It just felt weird compared to the other films I have seen this year. The concept of Pet Sematary is definitely intriguing but this film takes that concept and makes it seem very dull. I was bored out of my mind when I was watching it and was on the verge of falling asleep. I need to watch the original version now to get this out of my mind. Overall, Pet Sematary has an interesting premise based on already existing material but the bad acting, bland cinematography, weak script, and just being uninteresting bring the film way down.