Pet Sematary
Started & Finished: 10/23/09
One lesson I was taught in screenwriting regarding choosing your protagonist: Who is the person least likely to be caught up in your plot? For example, if you were writing Pet Sematary, you might ask: Who is least likely to believe in an ancient Indian burial ground that brings dead animals back to life? Your answer might be “someone who knows reanimation is impossible.” Like a doctor.
But the trick is to draw that disbelief out— if your character becomes a believer right away, you risk letting the air out of your story. And if your story has no air, then I’m left watching an hour’s worth of a gullible, possibly mentally disturbed M.D. whose undead cat keeps popping out of cabinets.
It is important to remember that this is Stephen King’s Pet Sematary after all. The last third of the movie almost redeemed the bulk of his famous (read: generally slow and cliched) exposition that leads up to the finale. But I was expecting more zombie animals, so I was a bit disappointed.
Unfortunately, I don’t have the childhood nostalgia of this film to find it very frightening. But I can’t really knock a horror film with Fred Gwynne (The Munsters), Blaze Berdahl (Ghostwriter) and a bunch of crazy cats.
