Monday, March 7, 2016

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #32 Pet Sematary

If I could ask director Mary Lambert one question about Pet Sematary, it would be this: The same child wanders onto the same road while a large truck is coming twice. The first time the parents sound mildly annoyed in their screams of fear, the second time they sound terrified. Why is this? Did they realize that Herman Muenster was going to save their child because it was too early in the film for tragedy to strike?



As with The Dead Zone, this is a Stephen King story that feels like it would work much better as a mini-series. The main plot doesn’t feel quite as rushed as it did in Dead Zone, but there are side plots that still feel as if they were likely intended to have more development. The most obvious of these is the character of Victor Pascow (Brad Greenquist). We’re introduced to Victor as he’s rushed to the hospital, severely injured, and dies under the care of protagonist Louis Creed (Dale Midkiff). Victor gives Louis an unbelievably vague warning,“The soil of man’s heart is stoney.’ If you know what that means, you’re doing better than me,” and then continues to appear to Louis as a ghost throughout the remainder of the film. Why is Victor’s spirit sticking around? Why does he declare in the last twenty minutes of the film that he’s not “allowed any further?” I have no clue.



There’s another subplot that seems fairly unimportant, but more than makes up for that by being the most genuinely disturbing part of the film. Rachel (Denise Crosby), Louis’ wife, tells a story about how her parents had forced her at the age of eight to stay at home while they went out to care for her ailing sister Zelda (Andrew Hubatsek). Rachel feels continuing guilt because she remembers wishing that her sister would die so that the family would be rid of her. Rachel later has visions of her sister and the evil forces try to torture her with her own guilt. Between the make-up and Hubatsek’s performance, the scenes are just messed up.



The actual plot of the film is a lot less interesting than these subplots. Louis and Rachel move to a new town, and make friends with Jud Crandall (Fred Gwynne, the aforementioned Herman Muenster), a local hick who saved their son from his first encounter with a dump truck. Apparently, the trucks run every few minutes down the road next to their house, filling up the local Pet Cemetery, but building a fence around their yard to prevent their son from wandering would be too much trouble. Eventually, their cat is hit by a truck and Jud decides to let Louis in on a secret: the locals can revive dead pets by burying them in a second Pet Cemetery (declared a Sematary by a misspelled sign written by a grieving child), not far from the first, which is on top of a Native American burial ground. (I’m not even going to waste my breath on how racist that cliché is.) This works, but the cat is noticeably more aggressive, and stinks.



Then, the evil happens! Their toddler son, Gage (Miko Hughes) is hit by another truck, and so Louis ignores Jud’s warnings and buries Gage in the Pet Sematary. However, Gage comes back, not simply as an aggressive corpse, but as a demon, killing Jud and terrorizing Louis. Rachel is killed, demon-Gage is killed, Louis deludes himself into thinking that he can get Rachel to come back non-demonically by burying her immediately instead of waiting. The movie ends with him kissing his blood-covered wife as we see her reach for a knife. Cut to black, Louis screams.



I probably made that sound fairly uninteresting, and it’s true that the main plot isn’t really anything to write home about. Watching the interviews about this film in the original 100 Movie Moments special, I find it a bit hard to understand why this film was chosen. The general consensus among those interviewed seemed to be that the movie had a groundbreaking theme of “body without soul isn’t life.” New rule: If at least two sub-genres (zombies and vampires off the top of my head) have been built entirely around an idea, you’re no longer allowed to claim that it makes your story special!



The movie’s real failing point, though, is demonic Gage. Creepy children can be effective, but the movie has a problem in basically treating Gage like any other monster, posing a physical threat despite being tiny. Even using stealth and a scalpel, I find it hard to believe that Gage was even strong enough to slice up Jud so effortlessly. Biting into his neck to severe his jugular shouldn’t even be worth considering, but the filmmakers do it anyway. Say what you will about The Omen, at least it knew that Damien wielding a weapon and physically attacking the heroes would not be frightening.



I understand that there are currently plans to remake this film, and I’m curious to see what they’ll do with it. That said, there’s nothing fundamentally “wrong” with the original. It’s cheesy, yes, but the cheese mostly works. The acting is decent, and Gwynne is somehow fun to watch, even when he’s just sitting there. I think this would be a perfect film for a Halloween movie night.

No comments:

Post a Comment