Pet Semetary - Blech!

[awayfarer]

$ome movie$ get $equal$ for reason$ the average viewer can't under$tand. Perhap$ there'$ $omething the movie $tudio$ realize that we $imply do not.

 

[Shayuri]

The kid did have speech in the book. He used it to scream obscenities and so on.

While the ending did leave room for interpretation, the feeling I got was that anything you bury in the ground there comes back -wrong-. Therefore no good will come of it.

Many references are made to the 'land being sour' and so on. And there's that massive evil spirit patrolling it. Bad signs, really.

 

[Barendd Nobeard]

Spoiler

In the book, during the fight with the boy, the wife dies. He's upset, obviously, and starts to think... what if it was because I took so long to put him up there? She's right here, so maybe if I go now... And he does, and buries her. He hears her come in the door behind him later, and she lays a hand on his shoulder and says 'Darling...'. So, his supposition was correct to at least a point; his son had no speech if I remember correctly. Soooo, it could be she was OK and just alive again, or she was possessed by whatever it is that indwells in people buried there and it was just stronger.. who knows?

Well, a slight correction:

Spoiler

In the novel, the boy speaks when he comes back. In fact, he uses the F-bomb. In the movie, he talks like a little kid ("Now I want to play with you!"), which is much creepier.

As for the book, well (for me) it was pretty clear the wife would kill the husband. For me, it was Stephen King using "it" as the wife's pronoun the led me to that conclusion. "Darling," it said. It. Not a nice "she" (if she was back and 'normal'). No, he used "it" so it's not human--it's now undead and will kill him. That was my feeling as I finished the book (more than 20 years ago, though).

I had also read an interview with King, where he said that he wrote the book years ago, and then put it in a drawer because it was "too scary." At the time, I certainly enjoyed the book as a 'return to form' for King, who has been sliding into lower standards (Firestarter, Christine, etc.)

 

[Fallen Seraph]

When I watched it as a child, I remember being more then slightly creeped out. Though one thing that ruined it for me was the dead-guy spirit (I have forgotten who he was), something about that just brought me right out of the movie... It felt out of place.

 

[Simon Atavax]

Just saw this for this for the first time. What a horrible, horrible movie. How the heck did it manage to get a sequel?

I saw it in the theater at age 17, and loved it. I rented it last summer for nostalgia's sake (I'm 37 now) and loathe it.

I can't BELIEVE how dreadful the acting is. It's worse than the garden-variety bad-acting-in-a-horror-movie acting. It's just loathsomely bad. That Tasha Yar chick is downright grating.