Movie Review Pet Cemetery

Pet Cemetery (2019)

Directed by Kevin Kolsch, Dennis Widmyer 

Written by Jeff Buhler

Starring Jason Clarke, John Lithgow, Amy Siemetz 

Release Date April 15th, 2019

Published April 14th, 2019

Jason Clarke, what happened man? I thought we were cool. I loved your work in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes but since then, you just keep letting me down. Winchester? Chappaquiddick? Serenity? Everest? The worst Terminator movie? What’s up man? What are you doing? You’re better than this. It’s clear your agent is a demon from the lower realms. Otherwise, I cannot explain the repeated terrible decisions that have culminated in Pet Cemetery. (Yes, I know the movie misspells ‘Cemetery’ with intent and I don’t care.)

Pet Cemetery is an adaptation of a rather weak Stephen King story about, wait for it, you won’t believe it when I tell you, a family in Maine. I know, right? A Stephen King movie in Maine, that almost always happens in his stories. This family is made up of Louis (Clarke), a doctor, his stay at home wife and mother of his children, Rachel (Amy Siemetz), daughter Ellie (Jete Lawrence) and a 2 year old son, Gage (Hugo Lavoie).

This particular family in Maine has made the mistake of hiring the most sadistic realtor in history. How else to explain selling the family a cottage so close to a busy, semi-truck heavy, highway that it's a hazard to be standing near, let alone attempting to cross. And in the backyard? Oh just a gate that leads to the realm of the dead and a creepy pet cemetery where local kids go to bury their pets while inexplicably wearing the kinds of Halloween masks that would give themselves nightmares for days. Seriously, are these kids supposed to be in a cult? No kid does this and isn't desperately mentally ill.

So, the death highway on one side and the gate between the living and the dead on the other: let’s watch what happens next. John Lithgow, so far beneath his dignity and talent he appears to be attempting to cry for help using the crinkling wrinkles of his bad makeup job as some kind of funky visual code. Lithgow is the idiot who informs his new neighbor about the hell’s gate behind his home after hearing that Ellie’s cat, Church, has been hit on the death highway.

He does this despite being fully aware of the curse on the hell’s gate. He had a dog as a kid and discovered the terrible power of the woods to bring back the dead in physical form but not in a recognizably happy or emotionally well adjusted form. They don’t come back the same and that’s certainly the case with the once cuddly Church, who returns in a deeply dyspeptic mood. He’s mean and has claws at the ready for everyone in the family.

Despite this glaring evidence of awfulness, Louis the utter dimwit, chooses not to put Church back into the actual realm of the dead with a humane syringe full of sleepy juice. Nope, he lets the cat go in the woods only to see it return and start the third act. I won’t spoil anything here, there are variations from both the book and the 1989 version of Pet Cemetery that I will allow misguided souls who wish to suffer this movie to discover for themselves.

I will say that not a single thing about the third act is nearly as scary as this overly insistent score claims it is. The twists and turns of the third act of Pet Cemetery are a procession of mediocre jump scares, poor decision making at the necessity of an idiot plot and unexplained weirdness. Mom has a plot in the movie that makes so little sense in the movie that I want to write a sonnet on just how ill-considered this subplot is. It’s really a wonder to watch the filmmakers introduce this plot and bail on giving it any kind of rationale.

If there is one thing in Pet Cemetery that is remotely effective, it’s the one thing that is all about me and nothing to do with how the movie works. I have a traumatic fear of seeing an Achilles Tendon sliced. It’s a fear that is entirely irrational and all my own. It started in childhood, perhaps with the original Pet Cemetery, and it has been an all consuming, gut-wrenching, personal nightmare ever since. I give the filmmakers here zero credit for tapping that particular well in my mind. They gave away this particular scare in the trailer which gave me ample time to leave the theater until the moment passed.

Pet Cemetery is a terrible, borderline unwatchable mediocrity. Honestly, I wish Pet Cemetery were a more conventionally bad movie. Instead, Pet Cemetery is bad in the least interesting ways. The acting is boring, the scares are bland, the direction is uninteresting. It’s all got an air of professional polish but nothing stands out as being very good. It’s bad but not in a bold or original way, it doesn’t take any chances.

I hate a number of movies for a number of reasons but I respect bad movies that take big old swings and misses. That’s interesting, being way off the mark, really missing the boat takes vision and care. The Room is that kind of movie. A visionary bad movie with a singular perspective that happens to be the exact wrong singular perspective. To a lesser extent, Suicide Squad is an example of interesting bad. They had a terrible idea how to make that movie and they stuck to their guns and failed in a spectacular fashion that I can’t help but respect a little.

No one who made Pet Cemetery appears to care about what they are doing. There is a distinct workman-like approach to Pet Cemetery, as if everyone were working hard toward building something they had no personal investment in. They could all be building different parts of a couch to be assembled and delivered as much care and personal involvement. It would be a sturdy couch but lumpy and ill-suited to all other decor.

That’s a wordy, snarky, jerky, way of saying Pet Cemetery is bad and don’t waste your money on it. As for Jason Clarke, whom I addressed at the start of this review: come back to us man. It’s not too late. I still think you can act. I still see that awesome performance in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes somewhere behind those mostly dead eyes. It’s not too late man, you can pull out the skid. I see you’re moving to television, that’s a really good first step.

Movie Review Serenity

Serenity (2019) 

Directed by Steven Knight 

Written by Steven Knight

Starring Matthew McConaughey, Jason Clarke, Anne Hathaway, Diane Lane, Djimon Hounsou 

Release Date January 25th, 2019

Published January 19th, 2019 

Serenity is a highly ambitious and deeply misbegotten attempt to make a modern film noir. Writer-Director Steven Knight has something going for him in Serenity but continues to undermine himself and his movie with bizarre choices that lead to an unsatisfying and almost laughable, laugh out loud conclusion. The film strands an incredible cast in what approximates a Shyamalan level of lunatic aspiration. 

Matthew McConaughey stars in Serenity as, no I am not making this up, Baker Dill. Baker is a fishing boat captain catering to tourists on a mysterious tropical island called Plymouth. Baker has a passion for fishing but specifically a passion for one specific fish, a giant Tuna that he has come to call Justice, and yes it is a heavily tortured metaphor. No points for guessing that as the film hammers the point into your brain pan. 

Baker is seemingly driven only by this giant tuna but lately other things have begun to permeate his consciousness. Specifically, Baker has recently been plagued by memories and visions of a son he left behind when he went to war in Iraq. Upon his return, his then girlfriend and the mother of his child, Karen (Anne Hathaway), has moved on and married another man and cut Baker out of her and her son’s life. 

Baker’s visions of his son are truly bizarre as he appears to be able to hear his son’s voice and vaguely communicate with him with some sort of water based ESP. In one of the film’s epically bizarre scenes, a naked Baker swims in the ocean with his also naked teenage son. Why? There is no good reason, it’s just something that director Steven Knight thought might communicate the strange, water based ESP thing I mentioned before. The nudity is an off-putting choice to say the least. 

Out of the water, Baker is approached by his ex-wife with a proposition. Karen wants Baker to take her husband Frank (Jason Clarke) out fishing and toss him to the fishes. In exchange, Karen is offering $10 million dollars and perhaps the chance to see his son again. Baker immediately rejects the idea despite Karen telling him that Frank has been abusive toward her and toward their son. After meeting the epically awful Frank, Baker still resists but will his psychic connection to his son change his mind. 

No, that last line is not me being snarky… well, not entirely snarky. The plot does legitimately turn on whether Baker’s fuzzy, incomplete, ESP connection to his son will cause him to accept the offer to murder Frank and it is as goofy as that sounds. There is a great deal more however to the connection between father and son including a looney final act twist that left me utterly gobsmacked. The ending of Serenity is surprising but not a good surprise, more of a WTF surprise. 

In an effort to take the classic noir thriller to a place that might appeal to the hip, modern, technically advanced older teen and twenty-something crowd, director Steven Knight has conceived a twist that is remarkably hokey and tone deaf. It’s the kind of twist that middle aged folks like myself laugh at and younger types will straight up ignore in the way you ignore grandpa’s less than helpful comments on Facebook posts. 

It’s a twist that works remarkably well at alienating audiences of all ages, uniting generations in eye-rolls of epic proportions and derisive laughter that will last till we reach the parking lot of the local theater. Honestly, I do admire the sheer madness of the twist attempted in Serenity but I can’t help but mock the result. The execution is so laughable and clumsy that jaw dropping exasperation can only evolve into giggles of sheer schadenfreude. 

I take no genuine pleasure in laughing at rather than with Serenity. These are a group of incredibly talented actors and a director I really do respect. Steven Knight directed Locke, an exceptional and experimental thriller that got the best out of the great Tom Hardy and demonstrated the talent for talking out loud to himself that would make Venom so sneakily entertaining. Knight knows how to make a movie. Serenity is merely an example of a hill too hard to climb to a destination that wasn’t worth climbing to.