Haven’t people read enough Stephen King novels to know not to move to small-town Maine? There are so many scary things in the northeast state. Residents have included a telekinetic pyromaniac named Carrie, a rabid dog dubbed Cujo and a murderous 1958 Plymouth Fury called Christine.Something’s not normal there.
But, of course, as the latest adaptation of King’s“Pet Sematary” begins, Dr. Louis Creed (Jason Clarke) is undeterred. Burned out after years of working graveyard shifts in the ER at a Boston hospital, he takes a job at a small clinic in tiny Ludlow, Maine. His wife, Rachel (Amy Seimetz), also craves the country life, so they move with their daughter, Ellie (Jeté Laurence), and toddler son, Gage (Hugo and Lucas Lavoie), onto a 50-acre spread, most of it an impenetrable mess of woods.
The old-fashioned country house is the highlight, but unmentioned in the real estate listing is the cemetery for pets tucked into the woods. When the family cat dies, next-door neighbor Jud (John Lithgow) shows Louis the power of the cemetery. The cat comes back to life, but he’s a hissing, clawing evil cat.
When Ellie is killed by an out-of-control truck on a nearby road, Louis’ grief drives him to the unthinkable: using the cemetery to revive his daughter. She’s not a cat — surely she won’t turn evil too, right?
The original “Pet Sematary” adaptation was a big hit in 1989, spawning a sequel. It was one of the few horror films of the 1980s that was directed by a woman (Mary Lambert), and King himself wrote the screenplay and even played a small role. But it wasn’t a top-drawer example of the genre — maybe the best thing about it was good ol’ Herman Munster, Fred Gwynne, back in the horror genre as the hermitnext door who knows the cemetery’s secrets, and the theme song by the Ramones (covered in the new film by Starcrawler).
The new “Pet Sematary,” directed by Kevin Kölschand Dennis Widmyer,isn’t bad, but it seems unnecessary. It’s even a little bland. In a new, exciting era of horror — with films like “Us” and “A Quiet Place” and many others pushing the boundaries, you better bring something new to the game if you’re a retread. Like we really didn’t need a new “Halloween” until we saw a 59-year-old Jamie Lee Curtis kicking butt.
Or, look at it this way: “Pet Sematary” isn’t even the best horror flick opening in San Francisco this week. That distinction goes to the feminist indie horror-western “The Wind” instead.
The chief inspiration in this “Pet Sematary” is that the family member killed and then revived is the 11-year-old daughter instead of the toddler son, and Laurence is pretty creepy (suggestion to parents of evil kids: Give them a cell phone and maybe they’ll sit in the corner all day and play video games).
除此之外,有一些乐趣,比如seeing a gray-whiskered Lithgow back on the big screen. A constant presence in the 1980s and ’90s, he works mostly in TV now (loved him as Winston Churchill in “The Crown”). Clarke, an Australian-born actor, has been hanging around Hollywood for years turning in interesting work without quite becoming an A-list star and is a steady presence here.
But really, what was the point of this sequel? As Jud tried tell us back in 1989 and again in 2019, “Sometimes, dead is better.”
L“Pet Sematary”:Horror. Starring Jason Clarke, Amy Seimetz and John Lithgow. Directed by Kevin Kölsch, Dennis Widmyer. (R.)Theaters and Showtimes