Pet Sematary...purposely spelled wrong

So I'm a little behind on the times here. I never saw Pet Sematary, until recently.

I don't really have an explanation why. I mean, I support Stephen King. I like the vast majority of his movies. I love pets. I love horror. I love 80's horror. I don't get it. All I can offer is an apology for not seeing this movie sooner.

Now that that's out of the way, on with my thoughts!

So, we rented it OnDemand, which if you don't know what that is, shame on you! It makes it easy for people like me to never leave the house.

The movie is from 1989 and, as usual with S. K., adapted from the book of the same name. This time, King even wrote the screenplay himself because he was tired of his movies flopping.

Starring in this movie is Dale Midkiff, who is in every one of my fave lifetime movies, including my all-time fave "Another Woman's Husband" with Lisa Rinna and Gail O'Grady. He plays Dr. Louis Creed, who is a doctor from Chicago who moves his family to a rural New England town. Also in this movie is Herman Munster, or Fred Gwynne who plays Jud Crandall, and the little boy from Full House and Kindergarten Cop that you love to hate, Miko Hughes who plays Gage Creed (the son).

By the way, the book and the film are pretty similar from what I've read, but as usual, the book seems a million times better.

Anyways, The family moves to this town, and are immediately troubled with bad luck. The daughter's cat dies, the son dies (which was totally obvious how he was going to die...they made more allusions to the trucks driving by than you can imagine):

everything is looking grim. There is even a scene in the funeral home where Louis's father-in-law punches him and blames him for Gage's death. Yikes!

Louis (Midkiff) learns from Jud that there are actually two burial grounds. One, the Pet Sematary is where the pets go when they "want to talk". The other, is an ancient Indian Burial ground which resurrects corpses, but the land has become "sour" so they come back evil. Well, you can imagine where this goes. Louis buries his cat and dead son in the burial ground, even though he's warned to avoid it, and they come back, you guessed it, evil! What will happen to Louis and his family?

In a side note, I just want to say that on the cover, see that guy with the blood and yellow eyes?

Well, ever since I can remember I thought he was the main character or someone that guards the Pet Sematary, or someone who comes back from the Pet Sematary...and wow, I was off. The character is actually a student, Victor Pascow, who is killed by a truck, and actually acts as a guide for the Creed family (because Louis tried to save him) and warns him against burying loved ones in the ancient burial ground.


he scared me the most, along with Rachel's dead sister, Zelda




Overall, I think the movie itself was great. It definitely had a few great scare moments, and of course the usual cat screeching scare moments that scare me anyway. Toward the very end it kind of gets ridiculous. You'd think Louis would learn his lesson. Also, I felt that they could've made the dead Gage a little more gruesome. I mean, he was hit by truck and he only looked a little pale. Compared to Pascow's dead character and the dead Rachel (the wife), Gage looked like he was still perfectly normal and had a pulse.


And hey, they're even making a remake to this in 2010! Get pumped!