Pet Sematary 2019: A Post-Post-Mortem, Or The Cowardice of the Lackluster Remake

I: Past Is Just A Prologue, or WHY Are Remakes?


There's nothing that makes me sadder than a poor remake.

Now before you get the idea that I'm that guy that is going to take a big, creamy shit all over this movie simply BECAUSE it's a re-make, hold that thought. Let me clarify my feelings on the subject.

A few of my favorite movies are remakes, actually. I didn't quite realize it until I sat down to (finally) get this entry together, (Apologies for the big gap of radio silence, by the way, was getting over a cold and stuff, but I'm back and intend to stick to a daily schedule for a little while, then  make a schedule of Monday and Thursday updates) but my favorite horror movie is John Carpenter's The Thing.

And don't worry, fucker, I'm getting to you...

The Thing is basically a perfect horror film. I have talked about a few movies I consider perfect on this space, but this is one where I'll brook no argument. If you don't like it you are wrong, sorry.

And one of the reasons it's so good is that it doesn't make the original film that inspired it, the 50s classic The Thing From Another World by Howard Hawks, look worse, nor does it retread old ground. It explores places the first couldn't or wouldn't touch, and finds ways to reimagine the threat of the Thing for a whole new society, while also giving homage much more directly to the original inspiration for both films, the seminal sci-fi horror tale "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell.

I think  remakes can be awesome, and remakes are one of the ideas that often intrigue me personally. I'd love to try my hand at a few remakes myself. But I have a very strict criteria for if something needs to or should be re-made.

•  Is there something about the original that hasn't aged well? (ie effects, performances, cultural context)
• Does the idea have a new context or setting that could revive the material?
• Is there room for improvement from an idea that maybe was cool initially, but not realized to it's full potential in the original? 

And that is where The Thing succeeds and the 2019 Pet Sematary falls flat.

Like the Thing, Pet Sematary is the second film adaptation from an original literary source, hence why I brought up this particular example. I know the first film also had a sequel, but that one wasn't based on anything by the original author and I'm not counting it for these purposes.

Two other favorites of mine come from the same well of horror movies from the 50s remade in the 80s, and I consider John Carpenter's The Thing, David Cronenberg's The Fly, and Chuck Russel's The Blob to be a damn near perfect triple feature if you're looking for a good time in quarantine...

When Posters

Kicked All

The Ass

The first revisited the source to bring to life a creature that would have been impossible in the 50s, The Fly crafted a whole new tale that took the same basic premise and turned it into a tragic love story that is a perfect allegory for terminal illness in a relationship, and The Blob just took something that was hokey in it's own time and made it into a practical effects gore-fest  that while not ground-breaking was just as fun as the original, but in very different ways.

So for the TL;DR crowd, good remakes elevate their source. Bad remakes loot the corpse of their source.

So let's dig in to Pet Sematary shall we?

II: Why Dead Is Better, or How To Take the Bite Out of a Horror Story

Did I mention that book covers used to be rad as hell too?
Cuz they were, once upon a time...

Pet Sematary started life as a novel the author didn't want to publish.

I think that is a really interesting indicator of how this is a story that goes deep into that darkness I love so much. STEPHEN KING  said "Yeeeaah, this is a little much..." and put it away. It was only published later because of contractual obligations, and I'm assuming with Steve looking at them like Jud Crandall like "Now, if ya read that book thayah, which ya SHOULDN'T..."

And you know, having read the book before anything else? I get it. This book is harsh. Even the kindest paragons in the story have darker sides to them, the evil in the story is pervasive, and the threat of death at best and true corruption at worst looms over literally every character no matter how innocent. And I fucking love it.

I see no reason to go easy on fictional characters when you're trying to make a point about the all-consuming power of grief and the corrupting power of "What if...?" made manifest in the Burial Grounds of the story. I had lived through the grief of losing a brother by the time I had read the book for the first time and the dark pull of the Pet Sematary resonated with me. I got the temptation that Louis Creed felt, that thought that "Yeah, I know the risks, but maybe this time... THIS time, it'll work...".

And what makes the story so heart-breaking is that there are very few points where things are actually good for our main characters. They are moving as a last ditch effort to keep their family together and make things better, forgetting that wherever you go, you take your baggage with you. So once things get good and weird, well you're seeing why they are this kind of desperate to fix something,  anything but more of this pain.

So, that is where we come to the meat of my problem with this movie. It starts by showing us the happy family driving in the car, the stock, lazy-as-hell way to introduce us to our cast in lots of horror movies. Some folks load in lots of little details in this and make me forgive them, since that is how things are in the book too. But in the book we are made privy to how awful this drive has been. Louis Creed, our hero, actually muses on both throwing the cat out of his car and peeling off while his family is taking a leak and going to Mexico or something. Not seriously, but that the thoughts cross his mind at all tell you a lot about where he's at. In the film they're actually pretty psyched, and bland about the whole thing. This continues for the whole first act. Moments that set tone and keep the Creeds on the back foot still happen, but not in the rapid fire succession they do in the original narrative, robbing them of impact.

Lou's daughter Ellie gets stung by a bee almost as soon as they arrive, Lou can't find the keys to the new house, his toddler son is crying, and his wife is pissed at him about just...stuff in general. The only ray of hope in this sequence in the book is the appearance of kindly old Mainer Jud Crandall, the best character in my opinion in any version of the story.

But the film just has the standard family in a horror movie moves into their new house sequence, it just feels so...flat. And there's no Jud in the scene. That a movie takes longer to introduce a character than a novel is just silly to me.

And that is where this movie really started to piss me off. For every new idea it has, it does five things that just take the teeth out of the narrative. Moving in? No problem. Relationship of the parents? Solid, they're just a little on edge from the move. Ellie? Unstung, until much later in the narrative. Boy, those truck jump-scares sure are loud though, huh? The film thinks that's enough foreshadowing for now.

"Look sweetie, I'm not trying to stress anybody out, it's not like we're in a horror movie..."

And the thing I like about this story is that every major scene has it's own special tone, occasionally making the novel feel almost episodic early on, but with each set-piece coming together to build the web around the Creeds until suddenly they can't escape. But the remake just takes every major dynamic and set-piece and just waters them down.

Louis losing his first patient on his first day at the clinic he's working at, practically before he's gotten his coat off, is now several days after he's started. The sequence with Victor Pascow's death and everything related to it is done so predictably I was counting off beats in my head, like watching a re-run instead of a movie.

WELP I'mma just head out...

And the harshest elements of the narrative are excised entirely for your comfort. For example:

• The fraught marriage of the Creeds is reduced to a few existential talks about what happens after we die that have very little bite, a far cry from the opposed views of a medical man and a woman raised in a well-off religious household.
• Louis and his in-laws relationship goes from a constant thorn in his marriage to a nod at one another at a funeral. (a funeral where, in the novel, they get into a drunken fist fight and knock over the casket) They don't even get lines. No mention of my favorite element of this subplot either: that his father-in-law tried to pay him to break off their engagement when he was in college.
• Mentions of the previous uses of the Burial Ground and the foul deeds of those resurrected there are relegated to a few lines in a newspaper clipping. These are full flashbacks in both the book and previous film, and enrich the story because they illustrate the brain-washing power of the spirits that reside there.
• Rachel Creed's aversion to death is still because of her relationship with her sister Zelda, who died slowly and horribly of spinal meningitis. But we are largely told this because showing too much might make someone uncomfortable, and we wouldn't want that. 
• As usual, in every version of this story, Jud's wife Nora is cut loose almost entirely, her part of the story assigned to another character made up for the 80s film, and here just removed until a scene that I think was part of a mostly deleted subplot about Jud burying Nora in the Burial Grounds, but that is never hinted at before or after and feels tacked on.
• And of course, the deaths in the story are mostly sanitized and the most important actually happens in a strangely bloodless off screen way that has a whiff of a re-edit. But we're about there.

So, any choice that has some interesting element, like the casting of John Lithgow's Jud as a much more morose character with a hole of grief in his heart and weary smile (and he strangely feels on autopilot here for the most part, bringing none of his usual energy or eccentricity to the part), the strangely ritualistic way local children bury their pets with an eerie procession with masks, or the new ways that Rachel Creed's sister Zelda factors into the narrative, are undone by making the film around them like a quieter, gentler version of the 80s adaptation.

 For a film with a lot of horror built off meningitis, this film severely lacks a spine.

Don't look sad John, this isn't your fault my dude.

III: Adaptation Decay, and Why Surprises Aren't the Same as Twists

Adaptation Decay is the process that naturally occurs when a story is moved from one format to another. Obviously, a movie based on every little detail of a book would be unfilmable, even for one as straight-forward as Pet Sematary, such a beast would probably be in the neighborhood of six hours.
So stuff get's trimmed, condensed, or excised. And the 2019 film has a major, terminal case of AD. I think, after comparing the finished product to the trailers, this movie went through some heavy edits and reworkings. The things I've mentioned that I found really interesting seem to be from a much more liberal and creative cut of this flick that I'd love to see, but I doubt that is forthcoming. If the Snyder Cut doesn't exist (and believe me, it doesn't) then the Interesting Cut of PS'19 is nowhere in sight, guys. So what I've got to work with is what's there, not what I think might have been there in another cut.

Which is where the point of my last section comes in. For those that came in late, and don't care about spoilers, the story of  Pet Sematary is pretty simple: Louis Creed and his family move to Maine, make friends, experience some minor deaths, then discover the quaint "pet sematary" is merely the gateway to much more sinister den of evil deep in the backwoods of Little God Swamp, an ancient corrupted burial ground dating back centuries that revives the dead, but brings them back...wrong. Louis is shown this when his daughters cat Church dies, and Jud shows him the way to use it's power. The cat returns, but is a stinking, dirty, predator that frightens his children and is generally a shit.

He doesn't want chicken, but he'll take your liver, if you got one...

 But once tapped into, the spirits there seem to ensure that you'll return one day, or show someone else the way to use them. And Louis is forced to consider it when his son Gage is killed in a horrific accident. If the forces in Little God are capable of making such things happen is toyed with, but never confirmed or denied. All we know is that the seductive evil will not stop until it's completely destroyed the Creeds.

And yet again, this is where the film falls apart. It was first hinted at, then out and out confirmed that the chief way the 2019 version would differ from the originals was that Ellie would die instead of Gage, a fumbled ball from the get go. The film is shot, edited, and presented as if this is supposed to be a surprise. And since it's not, I'm already tired of this being referred to as a 'twist'. The directors reasons are sound, they wanted to explore more of the dissonance of the resurrection process with a character we talked with more, and had more of a personality to lose in the revival process. And aspects of this do work. Zomb-Ellie is damned creepy, and the scene where she dances in a dirty tutu with no grace, coordination, or charm as she did earlier in the film is the only properly good part in the whole movie for me because it was paced and executed well, and I saw the potential of what this could have been.

But twists are not just surprises hidden in a narrative. Twists should be surprising, yes. But then when you look back through the narrative, you see the subtle clues that let your brain know this was coming, but because of the artistic misdirection required, you don't see how it was done till later.

Essentially, a good twist is like a magic trick, and a bad one is just someone jumping out and yelling "Boo! I was the killer!" without preamble or foreshadowing. And yeah, the switcheroo of Ellie for Gage is on that level for me, a choice that could have been artistically fun and subtle being rendered graceless and clumsy, much like the resurrected version of the character, by the lackluster choices surrounding it.

Which has the end result of this version playing
like an incredibly dark version of "Go the Fuck to Sleep"..

And instead of the rabbit hole of different choices we could make once this deviation has been made, and the kind of things that could have made this a worthwhile remake (exploring new territory previous versions couldn't or wouldn't go to), the back third of this movie is just a lackluster tread through references to the last version, tensionless action, and a discarding of the rules of how the ancient burial ground works, which leads to a pretty meh ending that thinks it's much more clever than it is.

And why was THIS never even mentioned again?

So, in the end all I can say is put this one at the back of your watchlist if you still feel like checking it out. But I feel it'd be better served by burying it far away and hoping against hope and sanity that it comes back better...

NEXT TIME: LIVE FROM NEW YORK, IT'S CANNIBALISTIC HUMANOID UNDERGROUND DWELLERS!!!