Pet Sematary
Pet Sematary
R | 21 April 1989 (USA)
Pet Sematary Trailers

After the Creed family's cat is accidentally killed, a friendly neighbor advises its burial in a mysterious nearby cemetery.

Reviews
Raetsonwe

Redundant and unnecessary.

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Spoonatects

Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

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FirstWitch

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

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Lollivan

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

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one-nine-eighty

Based on a Stephen King book, "Pet Semetry" is a horror film that looks at death, desire, reanimation, and why you should never build on top of an ancient Indian burial ground. A young 2.4 family move into the country, the new house they move into is right next to a big and dangerous road. They learn from their new neighbour that the road is deadly and has killed lots of local resident's pets over the years, and as such there is a local cemetery that was built by kids for their pets. While the family, minus the father, are away for a holiday tragedy strikes and the family cat is killed. The young father takes the cat to "Pet Semetry" and buries him, little does he know about the magic and witchcraft sown deep into this ancient Indian burial ground. The cat is reanimated, but is not like his former self, instead of being a loving cat; he's now feral and vicious. These are only the beginning of the problems though. Film's made out of Stephen King book's don't/didn't always make the grade on the silver screen, a lot of them never captured the tension of his writing and the movie adaptions ended up a little cheesy. This film however managed to do well, and doesn't detract massively from the book. I remember watching it as a youngster in the 90's and it was quite frightening. Watching it back closer to the age of 40 yo I can say that he film still manages to hold its own. The reason for this is because it's a solid story. Rather than get too deep into scientific reasons for events, or the history of the location, or even what form evil is taking in the film - it's handled from the point of view of the young father - we don't learn any more than he does, we just have to go with it. Nowadays there would likely be an entire additional hour looking at why reanimation affects different people differently, and why the evil is there in the first place. Granted, the book does delve into some of these things a little to build the tension, but in the film, there just isn't enough time to do so while maintaining the pace of events. So handling it the way it was generally works. The casting and acting is good, the young father is played by Dale Midkiff and is generally believable throughout. Denise Crosby plays he wife and does well, although I've never really been a fan for some reason (she has limited expressions and emotions - sorry). Fred Gwynne is the narrator and neighbour and drives the film forward, his performance is really good actually - sometimes hard on the ears to understand due to the random accent, but he's a rock in this film. The real winner is Miko Hughes as Gage Creed, the youngest child. He seems to be play sweet and creepy real well - I can see why he went on to have a decent career beyond this. Fair enough his lines are a little staged early on, but the switch in persona he manages later makes up for the cheesiness of the opening performance he brings. All in all this is a decent film, I can see why it's been rated highly amongst reviewers and I concur with them for the most part. For me this gets a 7 out of 10 - It's an all-around decent horror film, with a mix of emotions on display, despite being nearly 30 years old it manages to not look dated and out of place.

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MonsterVision99

I finally got around to watch this after seeing it being broadcasted in TV almost every month as a kid, everyone I know has seen this movie and for a while I felt like I needed to see it all the way through, it turned out to be better than I remember (I had only seen parts of it on TV) but its still nothing special.Its somewhat well made, its quite charming, and the atmosphere really sucks you into the film and gets you in the right mood to enjoy it, that's probably why I gave it a good rating, its enjoyable to watch but in retrospect its not really all that great, it could fall apart very fast if you think about it too much.I like that it has enough balls to show things that you wouldn't usually see in a mainstream horror movie at the time. The acting isn't always the best, the characters could be a bit annoying, many things happen in a very convenient way just to get the story going, I don't think this movie knows what it wants to be, its tone its kind of confusing at times and the ending its pretty crappy. Overall, a good time with enough heart and enough suspense to make it worthwhile.

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msudude22

I enjoy this movie, it is one of the better Stephen King movies. I watched it again tonight. The only thing that is unbelievable is when Louis digs Gage's body up. It is in one piece. I would think if someone that small got hit by a semi going at a high rate of speed, the body would be in several pieces. But despite that, it is a good movie.

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classicsoncall

Well you have to admit, this was a creepy story, even for Mr. King. Having one of your main protagonists turn out to be a three year old, knife wielding murderer is somewhat beyond the pale. But King wrote the screenplay based on his own novel, so I'm thinking it held pretty close to the original story. And it was pretty cool to see him show up as the Minister at the cemetery when Gage was buried, that doesn't happen too often.I don't think I've ever seen Fred Gwynne outside of his TV work, so having him here as the Creed's next door neighbor was a nice touch. It turns out that Dale Midkiff and Denise Crosby portraying the Creeds are also primarily TV actors, which explains why I haven't caught them in any prior work. They were OK here but their performances didn't really have a stand out quality.Some of the things that got to me didn't really have an impact on the story, but I thought I'd mention them. What's with that odd portrait in the Goldman's living room showing the kid dressed in green with the whip in his hand? That was pretty bizarre. And who names a cat 'Church'? For his trouble, Church didn't even get a screen credit, I really wanted to know who played the part.But you know what might have been the most bizarre thing about the picture? How about ghost sister Zelda with the spinal meningitis - the role was actually played by a man!!!

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