Let’s face it. Stephen King’s renaissance is in full swing. He’s bigger than ever. His new books are doing well and there’s still continuous love for his old work. So much so that we didn’t just get an IT remake, but also got one for Pet Sematary. There are many out there who believe that Pet Sematary is Kings scariest work. Though it is a well debated topic. Others say IT, The Shining, or Salem’s Lot, but I say otherwise. Here’s my review.

If you read my Pet Sematary book review then you’ll know that I don’t find his books scary. They’re great, but I don’t tend to ever find books scary. Movies on the other hand, have actually frightened me. There’s a lot of reasons why this is but a big part of it is that the story in condensed. They turned a four hundred paged book into a one hour and forty minute movie. Pet Sematary suffered where other King adaptations like IT and 11/22/63 soared. I’m sorry to say that this adaptation of the book fared no better than the 80’s version did.

There were a lot of changes in this book to movie adaptation, and if you listen to my podcast Future Flicks with Billiam, you’d already know about them. That being said, the changes didn’t bother me much. What bothered me, and what made the movie suffer the most, was the fact that the time constraints caused the story to lose a lot of what made it great. The Indian burial ground, and thus the sematary, was reduced to nothing but a zombie producing factory. It should have been so much more. It’s powers should have been so much more than simply bringing the dead back to life.

A part of what made the book great was the well written and relatable characters and how well the powers of the sematary were shown. The movie misses all of that. The under two hour movie rushes things so fast that there’s no time to care about anyone or feel bad for anything that happens to them. When people started dying, I didn’t care. I even like the actors that were hired to play the parts and they couldn’t save it

So if you couple the poor (movie) characters with the lacking story and what we get is a skippable film that could have been so much better. I didn’t hate this movie. Not at all. I just didn’t like it. It shouldn’t have been a movie at all. It would have been better if it was a limited series or broken into two films.

Just because we’re in the middle of a Stephen King renaissance doesn’t mean that everything is going to be good.

Pet Sematary gets a 5.5 out of 11

Want to check out my Pet Sematary book review? Click here.