Pet Sematary begins with Dr. Louis Creed who moves from big city to a small town in Maine.  In Ludlow, he settles into a spacious house with his wife and two children.  He works in a university hospital and after failing save a student named Victor Pascow, he starts to have nightmares about it.  October is fast approaching and changes have occurred.  The family cat is no longer friendly and the Creed family reacts to in different ways.  Whether haunted by past incidents or present tragedies, as head of the family Louis Creed finds himself having to make decisions despite the advice of Jud Crandall.  The people intimately involved with Pet Sematary, that being Louis, Jud, and Ellie, are set on a collision course among each other.  Rachel is still at her parents’ house dealing with the nightmares of her sister.  When she returns to Ludlow, it signals a new beginning for both her and Louis.  There are two endings to the movie and the one chosen was the better of the two.  Although I did like the closing scene in the alternate ending as it is the more disturbing of the two.

Evaluation of Pet Sematary

I knew from the beginning Pet Sematary wasn’t going to be a great movie, but this remake fell far from the mark of being a solid good movie.  I commented a little about my preference for the original, but I will give this version credit of expanding and making it different.  I just wish Ellie had less freakish strength in a particular scene.  It was hokey and unbelievable.  You can have a mean character in any story, but it begs the question of why Louis would hang out more than once with such a grumpy old fart that stayed grumpy throughout the movie.  I wouldn’t have invited Jud to my child’s birthday party or invited him over for a beer.  There’s a way to warn someone without sounding like a know it all.  There were two versions of the end scene.  The version included in the movie was the one I preferred although the end scene in the alternative one was more disturbing.  For everything Ellie was, I would’ve changed her outcome so with this in mind this movie fell into the territory between bad and good.  Since I didn’t account for this rating, it’s either a high bad or low good at 70.5% (hypothetically speaking).  Going off my rating sheet, I would rate it 71% to put a positive spin on it.