Pet Unnecessematary.

I find it absolutely fascinating to watch how movie making has progressed so far even during my lifetime and yet somehow there’s always somebody trying to take two steps backwards for every one of progress; or, as Blade once so eloquently put it “There’s always some motherfucker trying to ice skate up a hill”.

Now you could apply this to any number of films from the last couple of years in any number of facets; for every Weta workshop masterpiece there’s some scrub trying to cut a few corners and you end up with something that looks like it would have been scoffed at if it had appeared in a mid-90’s video game. Wonder Woman is a great example of some of the worst mimed and CGI’d archery action I think I’ve ever seen. I’m not just talking about SFX though, even if it’s the easiest to see; I’m talking about the fervent desire from some corners of Hollywood to remake old classics and butcher them beyond recognition. Again. Hey, they stop making them, I’ll stop bitching about it.

There’s a distinct taint of hubris and self-importance in the air when it comes to remakes. Somebody decides they’ve had enough of whichever certified classic they’ve seen recently, thinks they can do better with the aid of modern computing power and away we go into a usual torrid, green-screen addled affair which shares a title and little else with the movies you know and love. It isn’t a universal thing though; the IT remake was pretty decent, and there have been others along the way that were entertaining enough without setting the world ablaze or endangering their predecessor’s status (I’m looking at Robocop, Total Recall and… ok it’s a short and undistinguished list of mediocrity). Still, I’m of the opinion if you’re going to remake something, you’d better be damn sure your version is all killer and no filler. You’re probably ahead of the game here in terms of what I watched at the cinema this weekend.

Pet Sematary is a classic late 80’s horror gem, based of course on the Stephen King novel which it turns out from the foreword in the edition I bought at the weekend (I occasionally read, what of it?) is largely autobiographical up until the rising from the grave part. I mean, obviously there are going to be spoilers here, but the novel is the best part of 40 years old and the original movie is 30 years old this year, so you’ll forgive me if your plaintive wailing falls largely on unsympathetic, consciously deaf ears. I’ve not watched the ’89 version for a good long while so I figured I’d go grab a copy and do the old compare/contrast schtick for a lark. I haven’t finished the book yet, so we’ll have to go without that third level of criticism for now.

Here’s the thing: if you look past the ropey 80’s effects and the TV movie acting, ’89 Pet Sematary is a really neat little film. It’s creepy where it needs to be, not overly reliant on jump scares and despite its age, holds up fairly well. The kid who plays Gage genuinely looks like he’s having a right old time once finds himself back from the dead with nought but a scar on his little bonce from the portentous truck/child interface that sets everything in motion. Some dodgy child endangerment aside (there’s a bit at the end where he trips over backwards and looks like he took a decent knock to the external occipital protuberance, which as any Gorilla Monsoon fans will know will knock you out in a hurry) he’s an nasty little bugger with an unsettling aptitude with a scalpel. The ending is one of King’s least disappointing as well, just satisfying enough to round things off nicely.

Fast forward 30 years and the inevitable has happened following the success of IT part one; screenwriters and producers and now frantically scanning through Steven King novels trying to work out who has what film rights and what they can afford to get off the ground in the least amount of time possible. A couple of his short stories have ended up as Netflix exclusives and I’m positive an entire raft of them is about to flood our screens, starting with Pet Sematary. Trouble is, with all this new-fangled technology and advancements pretty much across the filmmaking board, they’ve managed to concoct a movie that is different in random ways to the original but somehow manages to be so completely devoid of atmosphere it’s like watching a documentary.

John Lithgow is OK as Jud but the story doesn’t really go into why he leads Louis to bury the cat beyond the boundaries of the titular graveyard, or at least it just feels kind of out of the blue. They tease a Wendigo reveal which goes absolutely nowhere and oddly both movies completely omit Jud’s wife for no reason I can discern. The biggest “why would you do that?” moment comes with that one big moment: spoiler alert one of the kids bites it in the radiator of a speeding truck and that’s when we get to the real nitty gritty. Forgiving the idea that proper cemeteries have neither sufficient night-time security nor passers-by enough for the period of time it takes to dis-inter someone that nobody notices the new University Doctor digging up corpses, 2019 Pet Sematary inexplicably doesn’t kill off then reanimate then kill off Gage, the toddling terror but instead chooses to off the much older Ellie. I don’t know if they planned it as a clever twist maybe, just to get us off-guard for the moment where child-face meets speeding truck, but it’s just sort of trivially annoying. Both films are (probably thankfully) easy on the child-injuries, but it becomes laughable; ‘89 Gage gets a decent length scar on his forehead and ’19 Ellie gets a kind of Bell’s Palsy thing going on when in reality they’d both much more likely resemble ground beef and offal. Part of the effectiveness of the original was just how bleak the prospect of a homicidal two-year-old was; we’ve seen a metric ton of creepy kids in the intervening years and sadly Ellie just wasn’t anything new. Baffling decision there and a bit of an own goal.

The ending is wildly different again, but despite pretences towards being more grievous it just had zero impact. I won’t spoil it here, but it just kind of fizzles out; I have no idea which is more accurate to the novel, but I’m hoping it’s the ’89 version. It wasn’t a bad watch I guess, I didn’t find myself tutting, sighing or groaning except for at the young teenage couple two rows ahead who appeared to have paid £10 per head to have a two-hour conversation in the dark. Either they were too thick to understand the movie or too thick to understand you shut your yap holes at the cinema, I never did quite work out which.