PET SEMETARY

I had seen Pet Semetary before, but it must have been at a time of my life that I can’t remember too well. Upon putting this one in the DVD player and starting it up, I realised that yes, I had seen it before but couldn’t remember shit about it. Look, anything that is written by Stephen King, and put to movie format is going to be good. I’m sure he has an entire quality control team preventing hacks or half-arsed producers touching anything he does.

The movie opens up with a young family moving into rural America, The dad is a successful doctor, they get a great house. Everything should be cool. There’s a great big highway near right out their property where big trucks pass through all day and night. This unfortunately means critters get killed trying to cross the road. Those critters, pets and other animals get buried at a pet Cemetary (Semetary) nearby. Unfortunately sometimes it means humans get get killed too.

Soon enough one of the locals is hit by a truck and dies in hospital. Our friend, the doctor is having strange dreams about the man that got hit on the highway right after he moved to the town.

Anyway as luck would have it old mate the doctor’s daugther’s cat gets hit by a truck on the highway that goes through the community. One of the locals, Jed (who was previously Herman Munster from “The Munsters”) discovers it and alerts the father. Judd convinces the dad to bury the cat in an old native American Indian burial site. Unfortunately it (the cat) comes back, not as the cat they knew but a much more malevolent version of their cat. The family can sense something is not right but this is now hitting the pre-teen daughter of the family pretty hard.

Despite the resurrection of the family cat life goes on for the family until an unfortunate day in the park where the youngest boy (who looks to have been around 4 years old) in the family looses his kite and chases it across the road, only to be hit and killed by a truck. This is actually a gut wrenching scene. I’m a parent and as you can imagine I don’t like to see children (much less toddlers) getting killed. The young boy’s older sister raises questions about whether God can bring back her baby brother. This is where the film brings up some serious existential issues around the powers of God around life and death.

The mother and remaining kids go to their parents house to grieve but the father elects to stay back at home. He decides to exhume the corpse of his child and bury him in the grounds where the cat was buried in the hopes the child will come back.

The child does indeed return but like the cat, he’s not the same boy they buried. That’s where I’m going to end the plot synopsis and leave you to watch the movie to find out how it ends.

PET SEMETARY is a great film, told by a master story teller. The story line is captivating and there’s enough gore to keep most horror fans happy and the dialogue and plot is absolutely magic. There is nothing I can fault this film on. It’s also probably the goriest horror movie I’ve seen from a Stephen King story. I’d go so far as to say it’s one of the better horror movies ever made. If you can track down a copy of this make sure you watch it. Essential viewing.

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