PET SEMATARY (1989)

Studio:    Paramount Pictures
Director: Mary Lambert
Writer:    Stephen King
Producer: Richard P. Rubinstein
Stars:    Dale Midkiff, Fred Gwynne, Denise Crosby, Brad Greenquist, Michael Lombard, Miko Hughes, Blaze Berdahl

Review Score:

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Summary:

A distraught father exploits a cursed burial ground to bring his young son back from the dead.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Dr. Louis Creed moves into a new home in rural Maine with his wife Rachel, daughter Ellie, young son Gage, and Ellie’s pet cat Church. The Creeds meet neighbor Jud Crandall, who lives across the street, when Jud rescues Gage from a speeding truck after the boy wanders into the road.

Jud warns the Creeds that trucks speed down their road frequently. Rachel asks Jud about a path Ellie noticed in their backyard. While Louis shares a beer with him on his porch later, Jud explains that the path leads to a pet cemetery where local children buried animals killed by speeding Orinco trucks.

Jud takes the Creed family on a hike to the pet cemetery. Jud shows Ellie where he buried his dog Spot in 1924. Ellie begins thinking about death while worrying that Church will die too.

At the university hospital, Louis treats Victor Pascow, a jogger fatally injured with an open head wound. Pascow inexplicably calls Louis by name and issues a cryptic warning before dying.

During the night, Pascow’s ghost leads Louis back to the pet cemetery. Pascow points past the cemetery and warns, “the ground beyond is sour.”

Rachel takes the kids back to Chicago to see her parents Dory and Irwin Goldman, who dislike Louis, for Thanksgiving. While Louis is home alone, a speeding truck kills Church.

Jud escorts Louis to a Micmac Indian burial ground hidden beyond the pet cemetery. Jud has Louis bury Church. When they return home, Jud instructs Louis to not tell anyone what they did. Louis remembers Pascow’s warning.

Church unexpectedly returns home, but as a more aggressive cat. Louis talks to Jud about Church’s resurrection.

Jud recounts how a ragman once told him about the burial site after his dog Spot died. Although Spot returned rabid, Jud explains that he still told Louis about the place because he didn’t think Ellie was ready to confront death. When Louis asks if anyone ever buried a person there, Jud vehemently says no.

When the rest of the family returns home, Ellie tells Louis she dreamed that Church died and he and Jud buried the cat in the pet cemetery. Ellie notices Church’s strange smell.

The Creeds’ housekeeper Missy Dandridge commits suicide. A subsequent family discussion about death compels Rachel to tell Louis about her sister Zelda. Horribly disfigured, mentally ill, and bedridden from spinal meningitis, Zelda was kept in a backroom like a dirty secret. Rachel shamefully admits that she was afraid of her sister and felt relieved when Zelda died.

A truck hits and kills Gage while Jud picnics with the Creeds outside. Rachel’s father Irwin physically assaults Louis in frustration at Gage’s funeral, causing the boy’s casket to fall.

Sensing what Louis is thinking in his grief, Jud warns Louis to not bury his son in the Micmac ground. Jud confesses that Bill Baterman buried his soldier son Timmy there many years earlier. However, Timmy returned diseased and feral. Local men including Jud burned down the Baterman house to destroy the abomination. Timmy forced Bill to die with him in the fire. Jud suggests that the burial ground might have killed Gage because he introduced Louis to its power.

Rachel takes Ellie back to Chicago with her parents. While they are gone, Louis digs up Gage and reburies him on the Micmac grounds.

Ellie tells Rachel that she had a frightening dream where someone named “Paxcow” warned her Louis was going to do something bad. Rachel considers the ghost might have been real when she equates “Paxcow” with Louis’ dead patient.

Unable to reach Louis over the phone, Rachel calls Jud to tell him she is worried about her husband. Jud realizes what Louis is doing. Guided by Pascow’s ghost, Rachel begins making her way back to Maine.

After the Micmac grounds resurrect him, Gage returns home and steals Louis’ scalpel. Gage goes across the street, murders Jud, and takes a bite out of Jud’s neck.

Rachel arrives. Drawn by voices, Rachel enter Jud’s house. Rachel confronts a frightening vision of her dead sister Zelda. Gage murders Rachel.

Louis wakes in the morning, sees Gage’s muddy footprints, and notices his scalpel is missing. Irwin calls to tell Louis that Rachel went back home and Ellie had a disturbing dream that Rachel died. Gage then calls to say he played with Jud and Mommy and now he wants to play with Louis.

Realizing the horrors he created, Louis goes to Jud’s house and kills Church with an injection. Louis briefly envisions the house’s interior disgustingly decayed when he goes inside. Louis finds Jud’s disfigured corpse as well as his wife’s body hanging from a noose. Gage viciously attacks. Louis administers another needle injection and Gage dies.

Louis sets fire to Jud’s house with Gage’s body inside. Entranced by his grief, Louis ignores another warning from Pascow before burying Rachel beyond the pet cemetery.

Rachel returns home disfigured. Louis still kisses her passionately. Rachel grabs a knife while Louis embraces her. The camera cuts to black as Louis screams.

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Review:

Moving from Chicago to rural Maine put the picture-perfect Creed Family across the street from Jud Crandall, the kindliest old neighbor anyone could wish for outside of Mayberry. It also put the Creeds between a road notoriously known for speeding trucks and a path to a peculiar piece of land in the woods.

Jud introduces Louis and Rachel, their young daughter Ellie, and toddler son Gage to the pet cemetery, a tucked away place where distraught children buried unlucky animals who wandered into that road. Hidden further back, far beyond homemade headstones, lies a stranger stretch of earth known only to a few.

Jud escorts Louis to a secret Micmac burial ground when the road claims Ellie’s cat Church as its latest victim. Believing the poor girl isn’t ready to deal with death, Jud has Louis bury Church’s stiff carcass in the stony ground. Before long, Church miraculously returns home, oddly more ferocious than before.

Louis was supposed to keep the resurrection between he and Jud. But when a too human tragedy hits home, Louis’ grief compels him to revisit the burial ground once again. Despite warnings from Jud as well as a ghost with a gaping head wound, Louis appeals to the secret cemetery’s power to fix his broken family. What Louis discovers instead is that sometimes dead is better.

Three decades have passed since the 1989 release of “Pet Sematary,” a movie I watched repeatedly with frightened fascination as a teen. The way I remember it, common consensus at the time and going forward agreed the film was chilling, gut-wrenching, and top of the heap in the realm of late ‘80s horror.

It wasn’t until 2018, when steam started picking up for Dennis Widmyer and Kevin Kolsch’s 2019 adaptation (review here), that the tide seemed to turn. Online articles about the new movie contained comments casting the 1989 original as overhyped, un-scary, poorly paced, even poorly written (by the undisputed ‘Master of Horror’ no less). Was the rosy fog of nostalgia incorrectly coloring my memories, or were younger viewers who weren’t raised on the film simply seeing it with unimpressed eyes?

Revisiting “Pet Sematary” over 30 years later, there’s no doubt in my mind that backlash must be based on mistaken 21st-century ennui that something beloved must now be seen as boring. Because I can’t imagine a take more inaccurate than identifying director Mary Lambert’s masterpiece using any of the unflattering terms above.

You’d be hard pressed to find a more functionally solid distillation of a Stephen King work condensed into a 100-minute feature. Unlike a number of King adaptations, there’s little to complain about here with regard to omissions, additions, or reinterpretations of the source material. Powered by an uncomplicated plot, “Pet Sematary” fires a straight shot through the meatiest beats, rarely getting sidetracked with inessentials while ensuring deeper themes about dealing with death always get their due.

There isn’t much negligible material in an otherwise lean and mean EC Comics-inspired terror tale. But if pressed to weed out imperfections, I’d maybe start with Missy Dandridge. The death of the Creeds’ dour housekeeper inspires an important discussion amongst the family that leads to Rachel’s haunting recollection of her dead sister Zelda. Yet earlier moments with Missy are merely cursory inclusions laying groundwork for her suicide, which serves her only meaningful purpose in the movie.

The cast couldn’t be better. Fred Gwynne does the impossible by embodying a character so infectiously amiable, Jud Crandall almost eclipses Gwynne’s iconic association with Herman Munster. Dale Midkiff fantastically flips between fatherly charm when consoling his daughter and zombified shellshock when grieving for Gage. Miko Hughes is as terrifying as he is adorable, putting in perhaps the most impressive performance ever pulled out of a child actor in diapers.

Everything about Gage’s death and subsequent funeral is absolutely crushing, from the boy’s bloody shoe tumbling in slow motion to Louis’ guttural “Khan!” cry underneath snapshots of their formerly happy family. The heartstring yanks are so deliberate, yet the classic cinematic techniques masterfully manipulate the audience so that the horror can have its precise emotional punch.

The visual of meningitis-afflicted Zelda has been burned into countless mind’s eyes. The shot of Gage’s cold hand jostling in his knocked over coffin pimples skin with goosebumps without being graphic. Elliot Goldenthal’s Amityville-esque score of cherubic la-la-la’s equally induces shivers. The Ramones’ ‘Pet Sematary’ is one of the only end credits rock songs to not suck. And try to tell me you’ve never mimicked Fred Gwynne’s drawl and said, “sometimes dead is bettah.” Individually, these are all memorable moments. Collectively, they constitute a classic.

“Pet Sematary” provokes thoughtful commentary, promotes morality about accepting mortality, and most importantly, frightens across a spectrum of sinister suggestions ranging from gory gruesomeness to tragically losing a child. The movie’s messages are timeless. Its imagery is often unnerving. What more can a fright fan possibly want from a horror movie?

Review Score: 90

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