Hollywood, in its infinite irony, has resurrected a tale about the unholy perils of resurrection.
The mean roads and mangy cats of Stephen King’s “Pet Sematary” are back from the dead in Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer’s vividly acted, blandly condensed remake of Mary Lambert’s 1989 movie, adapted from King’s 1983 novel. Bringing back “Pet Sematary,” of course, needed no mystical burial grounds. Horror is selling big at the box office, and “It,” the last big-screen remake of King’s work, made a killing.
King famously voiced trepidation about what he unearthed in “Pet Sematary,” a book he has said — in perhaps a clever bit of publicity — that he initially put away in a drawer, thinking he had “gone too far.”
But the book is a kind of perfect summation of King: equal parts schlock and Poe-grade gothic terror. If the new “Pet Sematary” is solid enough, it’s due in large part to the sturdiness of its source material: a darkly honest New England parable of grief, pulled from King’s own fatherly fears.