Take Five
By George Rose
July 14, 2009
The first half hour of Pet Sematary is utterly boring. It is the slowest development I have seen in a long time for a scary movie. The Creed family moves into a new house, meets an elderly neighbor, discovers a path behind their house that goes to a pet cemetery (the sign above spells the burial ground as Sematary), and some "freaky" things happen. Thanks to torture porn like Saw and Hostel, recent generations of children have become numb to the type of fright that older generations find truly horrific. A ghost with his head smashed in, a pile of sticks that glows bright blue and a housemaid hanging herself are things that would only make me flinch in real life.
I found myself truly bored at one point, looked at the clock and realized I was only 30 minutes into the film. Do I really have to watch the next hour and ten minutes? Only because it is my job to review this film do I force myself to do it. I start to wonder where the legion of dead animals are but quickly realize this movie has nothing to do with an army of zombie cats and dogs. You might say I'm giving away some spoilers, but I think I'm doing you a favor by revealing the stupidity of this film.
There is only one resurrected animal in the film, and it belongs to a child actress that annoys me to tears. While the film was released in 1989, I still think Dakota Fanning as a fetus would have been cast more appropriately as this whinny little girl. There are a few random dream sequences that are meant to scare but usually just confuse. The movie is more about the ideas of death and less about actually resurrecting creatures for the amusement of my horror-bone. I look at the clock, notice I am only an hour into the movie, and pray to God the book is better. How is this a classic?
Pet Sematary only picks up pace at around an hour and 15 minutes. At this point, I had given the movie a solid D- but start getting the notion they are going to resurrect a human. Mind you, this is done about half a mile away from the cemetery at an Indian burial ground. Who came up with this misleading title? I tell myself that if I see a human zombie, I will reward the Gods by giving the film a still-disappointing C-. I'm only that generous so that the bribe might work. Surprisingly, I am rewarded but the results are mildly scary at best. The only frightening part comes with the zombie human (I won't reveal which one, just in case you don't heed my warning to avoid this movie) and that only lasts about five minutes. Then it goes right back to being plain silly. This zombie should not be able to do 80% of the things it does. I consider hanging myself like the housekeeper. Now I understand why she did it.
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