Saturday, April 6, 2019

(2019) Pet Sematary - An Entertaining Remake of Terrifying Stephen King's Novel Adaptation

This was a movie that garnered a lot of hype as it was adapted from one of the famous novels written by Stephen King, the person considered to be the best horror novelist. My wife surprisingly was willing to accompany seeing this film, as apparently she had seen the original 1989 movie back then and wanted to give this a try. I personally was interested since usually movies adapted from Stephen King novels were not supernatural horror movies. So we proceed to see this on its premier day last night. OK, let us go on with the movie now.

Brief Story Line

Louis Creed (Jason Clarke - First Man, Chappaquiddick etc) together with his wife Rachel (Amy seimetz - Alien: Covenant etc) and young daughter Ellie (Jeté Laurence) plus the youngest Gage moved to a small town to get away from the busy city of Boston. They bought a new house with large acres of land which included a cemetery for pets called Pet Sematary. They also met with their new neighbor, an old man called Jud (John Lithgow - Pitch Perfect 3, 3rd Rock from the Sun TV series etc) who lived by himself.

When the Creeds family cat called Church was dead, Jud told Louis to bury it in a separate location where it was somehow magically brought back to life. This would be the start of the many mysterious and frightening occurrences in Creeds new place and land. 

So how would the story conclude? Find them all in this creepy & scary horror movie.

End of Brief Story Line

Well this was one heck of a real creepy movie. And to my surprise, for a Stephen King's adapted movie, it had quite numerous jump scare scenes which was unusual as mostly their movies would be psychological horror thriller. This time, the scary sequence started from the early part rather than a very slow burner where the real interesting moments only began in the latter part of the movie. I also thought the film had a lot of chilling moments where we would be feeling a complete sense of creepiness from beginning till the end.

What I love the most in here was the sound effects which were awesome. The musical background was amazing and there were a lot of scenes where there was only silence and we were accompanied by the sound of crickets in the forest. The long quietness also gave us a sense of anxiousness waiting for some scary thing to happen. And almost every time it was successful in making us terrified. The sound system in the studio where we saw the movie was terrific even with Dolby Surround 7.1 giving the shocking sense during those jump scare scenes. Probably if we saw this with Dolby Atmos, it might have been a more amazing experience.

This film was having a very small cast with everyone providing convincing performances, but the one that really amazed my wife and me was definitely the young Jeté Laurence as Ellie who was totally outstanding. There were not a lot of special effects in here, but the make up effects were great. Oh I also loved John Lithgow's appearance in the movie which was no surprise since he was so experienced in playing various different characters in previous movies/series.

For those who have limited information about this movie, it was a remake of 1989 film which I had seen so long ago, but I could not remember the whole story then and only glimpses of the scenes, especially the cemetery scenes. To the best of my knowledge, this one was not entirely following the exact plots from the novel and there were some modifications to the story. This might have been the reason for the movie having mixed critical review as the major fans of Stephen King might not enjoy such alterations to the story. However, for me and my wife who had not read the book yet, we were able to enjoy the movie since it gave us a lot of horrifying moments. Even my wife peeked through her fingers during some of the scariest scenes for us, particularly the ones involving that food elevator. Btw there was no mid or post end credit scenes in the film.

Overall my wife and I really enjoyed this scary movie. It was quite full of horrifying moments that successfully terrified us. There were a lot of creepiness throughout the whole film, and to me the climax was quite amazing, albeit a bit predictable. The wonderful performance of the cast also made the movie more interesting. For hard core Stephen King fans, this may not be as satisfying but if I had to compare between the original and this remake, this one would definitely stay in my mind a lot longer. Those looking for a supernatural horror movie would not find it here, but if you are looking for a horror movie that would make you terrified not because of ghosts, this maybe more to your liking. The choice is yours.

Mike's movie moments rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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