Back in the late 80s, Mary Lambert pulled of something of an impressive coup. Not only was she one of the rare, women directors working in horror, but she also managed to bust out an adaption of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary than not only brought the creeps and frenzied bloodletting that you’d expect from a movie about people not letting their loved ones stay dead, but managed to convey genuine themes of loss and grief among the sliced tendons and exposed brain matter.
However, in 1992, she went back to the well with Pet Sematary Two, an original story that saw yet more souls in mourning discovering that – in the immortal drawl of Fred Gwynne – sometahms, deyad is bettuh.
However, while I’m something of a fan of King’s original novel and Lambert’s impressively ruthless adaption, this second trip to the old, Mi’kmaq burial ground proved to be nowhere near as effective as the first, proving that you can’t teach a dead pet new tricks.
After his actress mother is flash fried by a freak accident on a film set, thirteen year old Jeff Matthews and his veterinarian father move out of L.A. and shack up in her hometown of Ludlow, Maine. Needless to say, Jeff struggles to settle in these new surroundings and inevitably butts heads with the local bullies, but he eventually makes friends with the downtrodden Drew, a kid with similar issues thanks to his brutish stepfather, Gus, who also just so happens to be the town sheriff.
Not only is Gus the sort of douchebag who thinks its proper to bring up that he and Jeff’s mom were once sweethearts at her funeral,but he’s also the kind of dick who’d shoot his step son’s dog, Zowie, dead for a minor indiscretion.
In defiance of his controlling patriarch, Drew enlists Jeff to help him take the dog’s carcass to the legendary Mi’kmaq burial ground in order to test to see if its restorative properties are as real as they’ve heard. Guess what, they are but Zowie returns a very different mutt that the amiable pooch he was in life. However, matters progressively gets worse when the dominating Gusgets a fatal owie from Zowie and ends up with his throat torn out and in order to cover their tracks, Jeff and Drew immediately do the dumbest thing you could imagine – bring him back.
If Gus was a heavy handed prick before, that’s nothing compared to the rabbit skinning, wife raping, bully murdering monsterhe is now and his resurrection only hastens the carnage that is due to follow.
But despite all the undead mayhem that’s erupting all around him, Jeff can only focus on one thing – if the burial ground can bring back anyone, does that mean he can finally get his mother back?
As horror stories go, Pet Sematary is something of an atypical one as it doesn’t really lend itself to a sequel the way a Nightmare On Elm Street or a Friday The 13th does and so Pet Sematary Two immediately faces something of an uphill battle when trying to justify its existence. The main issue is that, the only thing a follow up can do is to take the orginal plot and shift the parameters around a little – thus Louis and Rachel Creed’s devastating loss of little Cage becomes Jeff Matthews’ pining for his dead mother. However, this raises an issue far more dangerous than a dead dog or shitty parent as the whole point of King’s original tale is the damage that’s caused by an inability to let go. The shocking death of an innocent toddler means that it’s perfectly plausible that a parent, near crazy with grief, would try to immediately bring them back even if there was a large probability that the little tyke would come back “wrong”. However, the fact that Jeff is willing to try and bring his mother back weeks after her death after witnessing what the burial ground does to a dog, Gus and everybody else who gets planted up there makes him come across as some kind of fucking idiot.
It’s an issue the film is never able to truly scale and it proves to be fairly damaging to the story’s credibility, despite being a fairly easy watch. Lambert manages to bring in brooding, autumnal tones that always works well in a Maine setting, the production is nice and polished and the movie certainly isn’t afraid to play rough when it needs to – unleashing a standout scene of rabbit skinning that’ll have PETA double checking the negative and a spectacular meeting of a human face and the spinning wheel of a reving motorcycle.
It certainly doesn’t help that the majority of the cast is kind of tough to like as grief is a tough emotion to render on film without your leads coming across as moping drips. That’s certainly the case here with Edward Furlong, fresh from Terminator 2, not making much of an impact and ER’s Anthony Edwards barely registering as his bereaved father – even when he has nightmares of having sex with a big boobed, wolf-headed woman. Paging Doctor Freud, anyone?
However, making the save and keeping the film in the realms of watchable is the director’s refreshing habit of being noticably cavalier with the survival rate of her supporting cast with the odd surprise and brutal death perking up matters considerably. Tagging in alongside the film’s cold-blooded nature is nastily fun performance from one of Hollywood’s most reliable heavies, Mr. Clancy Brown, who, between playing the Kurgan in Highlander and voice Mr. Crabs in Spongebob Bob Squarepants, has an utter ball playing the gurning, maniacal Gus. A championship winning dickhead before he dies, Brown takes the resurrected Gus and goes for broke, delivering a grinning, turning monster who causes all manner of death and destruction for no better reason than he just seems bored. Stomping around the place, glaring at everyone from under that heavy brow, he’s a perfect antidote to the subdued a d slightly stilted performances of the rest of the cast. In fact, it kind of makes you think that maybe Drew’s character should have been the main character, as he has much more of a direct link to the horror that ensues and Jeff is technically not much more than an observer until the end of the film when his family reunion from beyond the grave inevitably goes pear-shaped.
Hardly the waste some might have you believe, Pet Sematary Two nevertheless shows us the notable difference between a movie based directly on one of Stephen King’s works and a movie inspired by one of Stephen King’s works and the gulf is unsurprisingly pretty wide.
I guess being buried in a Native American burial ground has much the same effect as being a sequel to a Stephen King movie – both return sort of… off.
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