Heavy Petting

When Ms. Spenser asked me to queue up Pet Sematary (1989), it turns out she meant the 2019 version, which she had seen on a plane and wanted to check out again. But since she hadn’t seen the original, she didn’t mind. Of course, there is the issue with the general badness of Steven King adaptations...

It starts with a family of four moving to small town Maine: doctor Dale Midkiff, mom Denise Crosby (Tasha Yar), a young daughter and toddler son. They move into a beautiful old house, unfortunately right next to a busy road frequented by speeding oil trucks. Across the road lives old duffer Fred Gwynne (Herman Munster), who is alternately warm and wise, and creepy.

The house is also next to the titular pet cemetary, and creepy old Mr. Gwynne takes the family there to wax philosophical about death, which doesn’t seem to be age appropriate for the little girl, who has a cat she greatly loves. When that cat is run over when the rest of the family is out of town, he takes dad to the old Indian burial ground, which is behind a tangle of roots by the pet cemetary - then up a hill, through an abandoned quarry, over a mountain... Not very very close at all.

And the cat comes back. But it’s changed now. Evil. And smelly. Mr. Gwynne tells Midkiff that he should never meddle in God’s domain like this - forgot that it was his idea in the first place. This is not too bad, but when the toddler is run over...

The first problem with the movie is that they could have saved a lot of trouble with a little fence. (Also not meddling in God’s domain.) There’s also the question of whether Gynne is supposed to be homespun or just weird. He is kind of responsible for all this.

But in this movie’s defense, the truck driver who runs over the kid is listening to the Ramones, who also do the theme song for the closing credits.