* Warning: Major Spoilers ahead*
Watching Pet Semetary has made me understand why Hollywood does remakes. While the title has cache as a brand name and clout by association, originating from the pen of one Stephen King, this 1989 creep show is a strong candidate for re-incarnation. Let me just say that I completely understand the rose coloured glasses with which we sometimes remember films first seen in our youth. Even the best examples of horror, (Halloween, A Nightmare On Elm St. and alike) can often look dated, crappy and lame to eyes witnessing them for the first time, many, many years after their release. Sometimes these judgments can be unfair, not considering the time when the film was first relevant. Other times it can give clarity to a film’s short coming and missed opportunities. Now, with my self-justifying out of the way, let’s turn our attention back to Pet Semetary. Adapted from King’s popular novel of the same name, box-office wise this film is probably his most successful page to screen horror adaptation, King even wrote the script. This alone is reason for a remake. It appears as though King may have been too close to the project, as the pace is slow, taking way too much to time to get to the inevitable and the subplots seem pointless. King seemingly didn’t have the objectivity to self edit. The Shining and Carrie, while based on King’s books were written for the screen by other writers, namely filmmakers, who could cut away the fat and get to the guts of the story all the while keeping a visual language in mind. From the very beginning of Pet Semetary we know the cat will die, the kid will die and everything will go horribly wrong for this generic family. It just takes so long to get there. A remake could pace it up, get to the kid dying quicker, which is the real drama of the story, and maybe spend more time with this evil re-incarnated baby. Another thing a remake could address is the numerous subplots. The whole thing about the wife’s complex with death and her strange back story involving a hideously disabled sister can go or be made relevant in some way to the main plot. There’s also the seemingly unnecessary feuding between the father and the wife’s family which comes to a ridiculously over the top head at the baby’s funeral. And what about the freaky house keeper who commits suicide? What was the point of her? Was she some sort of red herring? Perhaps this is all explained and relevant in King’s book, but on screen it really doesn’t work. I also thought that the resurrecting should have taken place in the actual pet cemetery instead of miles away in the sacred Navajo site. Despite rendering the title pointless, it is hard to believe the father could be convinced to trek all the way to this site not being told where he is going and what will happen there, let alone dragging a body with him. Maybe all this could have been made more palatable had the actors been better. While Fred Gwynne (of The Munsters) is probably the best of a bad bunch, the rest are terrible, especially the mother (Denise Crosby of Star Trek the Next Gen.) and who ever the little girl was who played the whinging brat of a daughter, she should have been the one hit by the truck! At the heart of it all I really think there is a good story, creepy, dramatic and full of the kind of conundrums that make an audience think “Would I do the same?” it just deserves to be presented in a more considered and cinematic way.
