Pet Sematary Two
What a waste of a good Kurgan.
If someone murdered and buried Pet Sematary and it came back wrong...it would still be better than this. There are a few things working against it from the beginning: Edward Furlong, lack of Stephen King source material (or support, he insisted his name not be used), Edward Furlong, a terrible script, and Edward Furlong.
An unspecified amount of time has passed since Gage Creed got all "no fair" on the asses of everyone in his general area, and wouldn't you know it people are messing with that Micmac burial ground again where the ground is sour and things that you bury don't stay dead. As in the original, it starts with pets and then escalates to people, only these are not people that we care about like the Creeds or Jud Crandall, these are Edward Furlong people and Anthony Edwards in a weird turtleneck people, so we're pretty much rooting for mostly-dead Clancy Brown to murder everyone, including the screenwriter.
If you've seen the first Pet Sematary, you've probably been having nightmares about the terrifying Zelda ever since. She's one of the most frightening images in any movie, and though she has very little to do with the story itself she's memorable because she's awful in all of the right ways. There is absolutely nothing in this movie anywhere near as frightening or memorable as Zelda, much less anything else in the first movie. It's a lukewarm retread with absolutely no discernible personality and nothing that works on its own merits.
If there's any one bright spot, it's Clancy Brown as a dickhead sheriff turned undead dickhead sheriff. He's clearly having a good time and he's fun to watch, and to the movie's credit there's a scene in which he causes a car crash that is actually well-staged and moderately effective. So that's one minute that works and around a hundred minutes that don't. Not a very good average, that.
It's shocking to know that this was directed by Mary Lambert, who also directed the first Sematary. The original is so assured and so deeply frightening that I can't even believe such a lazy, uninspired sequel had the same person calling the shots. If only she had learned the lesson of the first movie that sometimes dead is better. Not every movie is meant to be a franchise.
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