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The fallout feels less tragic than sadistic, and leaves you feeling more wrung out than disturbed.MY REVIEW: THE PROTEIN WORKS™ 100% WHEY ADVANCED The ruthless glee with which this “Pet Sematary” races toward its climax achieves the opposite effect. He also managed to implicate his Everyman hero in every one of his bad decisions, making it clear that Louis was ultimately inviting the worst upon himself. King’s language was subtle and patient enough to evoke something deeper and essentially unrepresentable: Let’s call it the replacement of one unthinkable nightmare with an even more unthinkable nightmare, all in the name of love. The problem is that said grammar ultimately feels crude and disproportionate to the story they’re trying to tell.

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Their command of the grammar of the mainstream horror movie is more than solid. Shooting in muted gray tones (the cinematography is by Laurie Rose), the directors clearly know their way around dank basements and doorways that lead to nowhere, and they handle the genre mechanics - the large-scale set pieces, the come-from-behind slasher attacks, the near-constant child imperilment - with swift, breathless aplomb. And Kölsch and Widmyer tackle their hair-raising assignment with lean, no-nonsense proficiency.

Some unnervingly realistic hellcat hissing and scratching ensues, nicely counterbalanced by the steady emotional conviction of Clarke and Seimetz, both playing decent, likable characters who don’t realize they’re on a fast-moving conveyer belt to every family’s worst nightmare.īuhler’s adaptation sleekly updates that nightmare, making one major plot detour that introduces some ghoulishly inspired comedy, and amping up the nasty childhood flashbacks that have filled Rachel with a deep fear of death and a raging sense of guilt. It gives nothing away to state that Church isn’t long for this world, or to point out that the animal will make a singularly unpleasant return. An accident involving a student (Obssa Ahmed) casts a bloody pall over Louis’ operating table his first day on the job. Jud’s friendly-crotchety demeanor hints at the very bad things he’s seen, both in the past and on the horizon.

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It achieved the full weight of not just horror but tragedy, sidestepping gratuitous shocks and unleashing a devastating rush of emotion.

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King’s story was an intimately detailed portrait of a happy, complicated family rocked by a series of unimaginable, exponentially compounded traumas. I lift up King’s doorstop of a book not to bludgeon this movie, but rather to draw a crucial distinction in form, approach and effect. “Not as good as the book” is both a tiresome assessment of an adaptation’s quality and, unfortunately, an often accurate one. They could also do better, though, by going back to the novel, which famously so repelled its author that he almost didn’t submit it for publication.

Moviegoers looking for an excuse to grab their companions’ arms for two hours could certainly do worse. The actors are better and subtler than their earlier counterparts the gore effects, too. It features fine performances from a cast that includes Jason Clarke, Amy Seimetz, John Lithgow and, crucially, the eight Maine coon cats playing the Creeds’ ill-fated feline. As adapted by Jeff Buhler (with a story credit for Matt Greenberg) and directed by Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer, this “Pet Sematary” is a swift and efficient delivery system for mechanized jolts and pummeling thrills. It was likely only a matter of time before Paramount Pictures exhumed this particularly venerable old property and checked for signs of life.Īnd up to a point, it finds them. Thirty years have passed since Mary Lambert’s 1989 hit movie adaptation, during which there have been countless film and television adaptations of King’s work several of them (including “It” and “The Dark Tower”) have arrived in the past year or two, suggesting a resurgence of interest. The new “Pet Sematary” movie proudly refutes this common sense, even as it follows a familiar chain of Hollywood logic.

If things look grim now, a neighbor reminds Louis, they can always get worse, and it might be best for him to leave bad enough alone. Tragedy has already befallen Louis Creed and his family, who live near an especially permeable boundary between the living and the dead - not just the dangerous road running alongside their house, where enormous trucks race past at terrifying speeds, but also the ancient Mi’kmaq burial ground in their backyard. The most memorable line in Stephen King’s 1983 novel “Pet Sematary” is a warning offered far too late.

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