My Review of 'Pet Sematary'

With the popularity of IT, Hollywood knew they had to hit the iron while it was hot. I probably know exactly what was going on in their minds when they chose Pet Sematary as their next Stephen King remake project. They probably knew it would be successful because horror movies have been doing really well lately, and people love pets. Who hasn't seen cat videos on the internet by now? The idea is genius, and they knew people would eat it up right away.

So, Pet Sematary is a story about this family that moves into this mysterious town so that they can have more family-time together. It's a massive lot of land, and a really big house.

The family consists of the father, Louis (played by Jason Clarke); the mother, Rachel (played by Amy Seimetz); the daughter, Ellie (played by (Jeté Laurence); and the son, Gage (played by Hugo and Lucas Lavoie). They have a family cat, named Church (played by the cats Leo, Tonic, Jager and JD). When they move over to this new town, they meet up with their next-door neighbor, Jud (played by John Lithgow).

Right from the beginning, it's a super weird movie and they really place the horror ambience into the movie. You can sense that there's something not right with the town, but you probably already know that because of the type of movie that it is.

They immediately notice that there are some kids having some sort of ceremony for their dead pet, which is weird and never fully addressed in the movie. In fact, that's one of the issues I had with this movie: It had a ton of things that weren't addressed. I had so many questions, and none of them were answered. The kid, Ellie, even had good questions that were never addressed. One of the best questions that came about was why was "Pet Sematary" spelled incorrectly? It was the title of the movie, and they didn't even explain it. Well, we know why it's called "Pet Sematary," but we don't know why it's spelled incorrectly.

So, it's a horror movie, and we know that there are going to be a ton of curious minds trying to explore things that they shouldn't be exploring. I used to have an issue with this, but having met more people in my life, I can see this being a reality. There are a ton of genuinely curious people that will not Google things before they go to just do things. A good example of this is people that eat Tide PODS. Oh my goodness, I'm watching a movie with a bunch of Tide POD-eating characters... Whatever, it's all in the entertainment.

So, what happens is Church gets mysteriously killed, and they have to bury the cat in the cemetery. Little do they know that there's history behind the pet cemetery. My brain was trying to comprehend how certain things happened, and why they happened, but I knew I had to shut it off to have a good time.

In the meantime, with all this happening, the mother, Rachel, is having issues of her own. She's having PTSD from a childhood trauma that happened in her past. It's a doozy of a past, and when I reflect back on the movie, I wonder if it was really that necessary to have that storyline in there, other than to make it a little more creepy. They had so much more potential to use that backstory for the rest of the movie, though!

I guess it's kind of that bait-and-switch thing with the audience, to make them feel as though it would be something that's going to happen but nothing really happens, but it does cause some extra distress later on. I don't know.

The motivations from each of the characters is kind of off. I thought the rhythm or pace of these motivations were kind of off. I didn't buy how certain characters were compelled to tell other characters secrets of the town. It was all convenient to help the story continue to flow. I think that could have been smoothed out a bit.

As for scares, yes, there are some intense moments, and they come at you left and right. You still have some vested interest in the characters, so you do feel for them.

Overall, I did have a good time with this movie. However, there were a ton of unanswered questions that I think should have at least been addressed. I guess that kind of goes with the nature of horror movies, though. As a horror movie fan, I'm not sure if you'll totally be shaken by this movie. As a novice horror-movie-watcher such as myself, I thought it had enough thrills to keep me going throughout the movie. I'll have to give this movie a seven out of ten.

I think it would be cool if they merged all of the Stephen King movies into one universe, and then they make some Avengers-like movie that will have all of the Stephen King remakes interact with each other.