Featured Creature: The one where deader is betterer

 

 

Title: Pet Sematary II

What Year?: 1992

Classification: Weird Sequel

Rating: For Crying Out Loud!!! (1/4)

 

As I write this, I have again been looking at turning some of my reviews into saleable content. (Have I mentioned I have an ebook lately?) That has brought me back to The Revenant Review, the single most forcefully retired of all my features. That in turn brought up one particular movie I didn’t know what to do with the first time around. This time, I decided to do a full review under this feature, which has already been home to some odds and ends from my zombie movie files (see the Night of the Living Dead remake and Leviathan). I present Pet Sematary 2, among other things the textbook case why Stephen King doesn’t do his own sequels.

Our story begins with tragedy as an actress is electrocuted on set, leaving her son Jeff and the estranged husband to seek a new life in Ludlow. Maine. The kid makes a new friend, a chubby boy who has the crude town sheriff for a stepfather. He soon hears stories of a burial ground where the dead return to life, and the tragic fate of one Dr. Creed. When the sheriff shoots his buddy’s beloved dog, they join on a quest to resurrect the pet. Sure enough, the tale is true, but the dog comes back mean enough to take out the sheriff. The pair try to cover their tracks by bringing the guy back to life, only to find him even creepier than before, and the story still isn’t going to let the dead mom go. Before the end, they will truly learn that dead is better!

Pet Sematary II was a 1992 horror film directed by Mary Lambert, created as a sequel to the director’s 1989 adaptation of the Stephen King novel Pet Sematary. The film was one of the first sequels to a film based on King’s work, and the only such theatrically-released film to be based on a novel prior to IT Chapter Two in 2019. (Yeah, I checked on that.) The film starred Edward Furlong as Jeff and Clancy Brown as Sheriff Gus Gilbert, with Anthony Edwards as the dad. The film was commercially successful, earning over $17 million against an $8M budget. However, it made far less than the original film's $89.1M box office, and received mixed to poor reviews. Lambert has continued to direct for film and television, including Halloweentown II and Urban Legends: Bloody Mary. A remake of Pet Sematary was released in 2019, with some elements resembling Pet Sematary 2 rather than the novel or the original film. As of 2022, Pet Sematary 2 remains available for digital rental and streaming through Starz and Hulu.

For my experiences, I’ve been having to sort out how many of my Stephen King-related rants I already put down when I took on Sleepwalkers (see also my worst list and video) and Maximum Overdrive. The main thing I definitely have to say is that I absolutely regard Pet Sematary as the best King novel I have read. (To me, the only real competition among the books would be The Eyes of the Dragon and Rose Madder, from when it looked like King might leave the horror genre entirely.) What I find striking is that there was a time when reviewers and commentators spoke just as highly of the original film as one of the very best King adaptations. It has puzzled me to see its reputation go downhill in more recent years, definitely independent of the remake or any other “new” King film. To better assess why, I decided the present film would be a good start, as a film that had genuinely impressed me in the past… and that right there says something about how King films don’t age.

Moving forward, what’s noteworthy off the bat is that there’s no attempt to make this a “real” sequel. We have the same setting and certain references to the characters and events of the previous film, but for practical purposes, this is an outright reset. On consideration, the nature of the undead has also changed, enough that it no longer corresponds either to the book or the original film. Among other things, the revenants we saw before were unambiguously alive, in that they ate, aged, and usually could be redeanimated by the same things that would kill a conventional mortal creature. This time, the reanimated are in many ways more conventional, grisly, gooey, and none too fresh after a while. The most interesting contrast is that there’s no break from their past selves, as strongly implied in the book. Undead Gus in particular seems like a creepier and far meaner version of himself, not a native god-demon wearing him as a suit. One more thing that just feels random if you know the franchise is that the undead effectively multiply by burying already-deceased bodies in the cemetery, something that wasn’t even discussed in the book or the previous film and wouldn’t come up again until the damn remake.

Beyond the reasonably ambitious conceptual framework, however, this one is simply a mess. Yes, there is a lot that is good. Clancy Brown, otherwise best known for Highlander and Starship Troopers (link for the soundtrack), is as disconcertingly entertaining as he usually is playing an actual psychotic. (His best/ most underrated role is still as the voice of Lex Luthor in the 1990s Superman cartoon.) As noted, his arc is transformation without fundamental change, all conveyed with surprising nuance. It’s especially intriguing and darkly amusing to see him go from protecting his pet bunnies to zestily preparing for rabbit stew. Furlong, just off Terminator 2, is up to the task as the kid, by turns sympathetic, believably temperamental and darkly obsessed. A further good word is in order for Edwards and Lisa Waltz as the sheriff’s wife, the latter the one character who brings out a sense of affection and likeability beneath his crude manners. But all of these things balance poorly against a great deal that is excessive or entirely unnecessary. This includes some outright “cringe” material, particularly a frivolous werewolf dream sequence that single-handedly lost this one at least one rating point. What literally drags this one all the way down is the distracting dead-mom subplot, which ultimately does little more than add 10 tiresome minutes to the running time. It was all well and good to show the protagonist dealing with his own grief, but the one thing that wasn’t needed was to have her brought back without Jeff even being involved. I find it all the more telling to compare this to Robocop 2, where the biggest tragic-backstory moment is literally never brought up again.

Now for the “one scene”, I worked ahead so I could get this in while I could still go back to a digital rental. After the dog is brought back to life, the veterinarian father corresponds with another vet who clearly knows something about the past goings-on in Ludlow. He finally meets the expert in person, to find him channeling a midnight movie host. We first find him talking to a taxidermied dog as the dad comes in. He says ominously, “Can’t you just let it be?” When pressed, he gives an account of the events of the previous film, which we have so far only seen referenced in an obviously unreliable tale from one of the kids, even claiming to have examined Church and Mrs. Creed. He finally declares, “There is no `blood condition’. The dog isn’t sick, it’s dead!” Then in case his feelings weren’t clear, he says, “You get the Hell out of that town!” It ends with his laugh and a close-up with one of the stuffed dogs. It’s a fine moment, but also the surest proof how much of the film’s melodrama was completely unneeded.

In closing, the one thing I have to add is that with this review, I have come one step further to making peace with what I did and didn’t do with the Revenant Review. This one is a true “crossover”. It obviously falls in the zombie-movie vein, but it’s also exactly the kind of 1990s-ish monster movies I had in mind when I created this feature. Finally, I find that it does give me a certain perspective on the original film. The first film was an egregiously ‘80s film, with all the good and bad that implies. The present film was the kind of ‘90s film that tried to work ahead of its time and failed. That is one more reason why I still absolutely hold up the original as both a “classic” in itself and one of the best and most faithful King adaptations. By comparison, this is a watchable film that could have been far more, far too often by simply doing less. That’s enough of an epitaph for both the movie and its time. With that, I can rest.