Hey SWS fans, we’re back in high gear with a ton of new macros. Meanwhile, see Pet Sematary below the cut.

I read Pet Sematary in the midst of a glut of King novels as a teen, bored to tears in a miserable small Indiana town (may a meteor turn the whole place to shocked quartz and ruin) one summer. I graduated from Dean Koontz to King, which I suppose is a good sign of growing up. Some things still stick with me, dark images and beautiful descriptive passages. I can visualize the passage to the burial ground behind the titular Sematary and the death of.. well, there’s a gruesome death that I’ll talk about more later, but it really sticks with a person.

Pet Sematary has a lot of the strength, I think, of Early King; the intense interaction of the unspeakable unknown with ordinary reality, the, I suppose you could call Lovecraftian element. It also has some of the later King refinement, though, in terms of the actual writing and sophistication. It’s a complicated story, going outside Good vs Evil and touching on a lot of Lovecraftian themes, the amoral cosmos, ancient evils and corruption in the Appalachian hills, rot turning precious things into horror, and on and on, but retaining that ordinary, awful hollow worry of a young family facing the wider world.

As an added bonus, King wrote the Screenplay and was intimately involved in the production, which was shot in Maine (at King’s insistence) about twenty minutes from his home. He even does his usual cameo routine, this time as a priest conducting a funeral.

So how the holy FUCK did it go so wrong?

This movie is awful, awful trash. It’s watchable trash, but it’s trash. Crass, shallow, uneven, ugly, occasionally resembling a made for TV movie (check those opening credits).

Uneven is a good word. Some of the acting is good; some is just decent, and some is repulsive. You can’t even diagram it on the basis of individual actors; Dale Midkiff, as Louis (the novel’s protagonist) is usually acceptable, even though he bears an uncanny resemblance to Keanu Reeves.. but just watch him do a soap opera worthy reaction to an important death scene:

That is almost beyond parody. They even made sure to have his hair tossed by a dramatic gust of wind.

Denise Crosby is pretty solid as Rachel Creed, though there are times she comes off as either a doormat or an irrational emotional weathervane. On the other hand, you can really buy her performance recounting the trauma of watching an ill sibling die.

Fred Gwynne of Munsters fame (Munsters sucks, go Addams Family!) does a decent one-note performance as Jud Crandall, the next-door ‘Maine Original’ Dual Citizen who introduces Louis to the Sematary and the burial ground behind, with its darker powers… but neither Gwynne nor Crandall seem to know why, or what, he’s up to half the time. (In the book Jud is a lot less eager to push the Sematary on Louis, but perhaps that got compressed for time here; at any rate, one minute he’s all but dragging Louis up to the burial ground, the next he’s wide-eyed with terror about the unnatural process).

Brad Greenquist plays a ghost, Victor Pascow, who.. I still don’t know what the fuck he was up to. Neither myself nor the roomie recall him being important in the novel; neither of us owns a copy to refer to to refresh us on that, could be wrong. Regardless, on screen, I can’t figure out if he’s a good guy, a bad guy, what he’s up to. Half the time he’s smirking and scheming against the living, half the time he’s out to save them. It’s very confused.

Here’s a quick plot synopsis: a young family moves to rural Maine so the father can take up a position as a doctor at the local college. They live alongside a very busy highway, and the resulting deaths of many pets over the years by semi traffic led to the creation of a Pet Cemetary (misspelled with the ‘s’ by children, on the signage) behind their new home.

Behind THAT, however, is an Ancient Indian Burial Ground, which has magic powers: it can revive the dead. Sort of, but… imperfectly.

Through a series of accidents, Louis is gradually dragged into reviving a series of.. specimens, including the family cat and a human being, and things go fairly straight to hell.

I did a rare thing for me after watching this movie, in conducting the post-mortem (no pun intended); I watched the special features, which consist of three short documentaries on the making of the movie. A number of items stuck out at me. For one, King was, as I mentioned above, intimately involved in the making of the movie; he apparently insisted it be shot in Maine as a condition of optioning it for the big screen, as he wanted one of his movies to actually be shot there, as opposed to merely set in the state. He was on set a lot, consulted with the movie informally, and got along with the cast; the house the main characters live in is real, but the house across the road where Jud Crandall lives was too modern, so they constructed an elaborate older shell around it, which was set up so they could burn it down without harming the original structure behind it (a really neat trick, to my mind).

The book and resulting movie have a lot of autobiographical elements; King lived in a very similar house after taking a job at a Maine university, and elements of the story are inspired by real life tragedies and near misses with his own children.

I think I know who to blame for it sucking after watching these segments too: the director, Mary Lambert.

Uggh.

First of all, she thought this was a *comedy*

She felt you needed to insert lots of what she assumes are blackly comedic elements to punch it up, and actually did the famous ending to the movie (which differs from the book significantly) as a last minute reshoot, because she thought the movie needed a wacky ending!

(For the record, the only real laugh I got out of the movie was from the monstrously bad ‘Noooooooooo!’ I put a macro of up above.)

About the only thing she did properly was insist on casting children for quality acting instead of merely relying on readily available twins (child labor considerations). A lot of the problems with the direction and confusing characterization can probably be laid at her feet, considering that she came straight from the music video directing world to do this movie. Music videos don’t require a lot of subtlety, and Lambert clearly never learned to use a lighter touch.

She also grossly dumbs down the nuanced evils from the book to suit a dualistic, Good vs. Evil worldview for the movie; creatures and people brought back from the burial ground beyond the Sematary are just plain evil, and in fact, infested by DEMONS. The ghost is, apparently, a guardian angel, in Lambert’s view (which is odd since he seems to revel in watching suffering voyeuristically). It goes on and on like that.

I could continue to rag on Lambert all day (really, I could) or point out more nitpicking shortcomings (like how many shots are too low or too high or have characters half out of the frame). I don’t know. This movie was apparently a huge hit, and inexplicably, most of the people involved are proud of it, or were when they did the documentaries some time later, at least.

Me, I’m just glad to have it behind me. The only lasting impression is a desire to pick up a box set of Star Trek: TNG to see some more Denise Crosby.

Oh, and of course, to never set foot in Maine. It’s apparently full of demons.

Next Week: Tales from the Darkside the Movie. Another anthology? Uh-oh.
Last Week: The Running Man! The Governator!