I’ve written about Pet Sematary before. The original cracked open something in me back in ’89 that I’ve never quite been able to close, and it remains one of my favourite horror films. So when a sequel was finally announced, I was very excited. But the scathing reviews lowered my expectations well below the threshold I need to fork up money for a theater ticket, and I was happy enough to catch it for the price of a rental. Someday. But that someday just never came. The sediment accumulated on top, and whatever momentum I had to see it got buried right along with it.
It really didn’t help that Stephen King had his name removed from the credits before release. I caught a few minutes on cable maybe a year later, watched long enough to get the gist of what was going on, and that was all I needed. It went straight into that mental filing cabinet I keep for unnecessary sequels, right next to City Slickers 2 and Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, films that existed only because a previous film made money. I didn’t think about it again for years, and it never occurred to me to give it a proper go.
When I finally sat down and watched Pet Sematary Two, I was biting a bullet and expecting a few lashes. What I wasn’t expecting was a story about two grieving kids making terrible decisions because the adults around them were monstrous. That left suprisingly raw, and the campier elements don’t touch it. Furlong has just lost his mother in a freak accident on a film set. His friend Drew’s stepfather, the town sheriff played by the immortal Clancy Brown, beats him regularly. When the boys discover the Micmac burial ground, they use it, and eventually the stepfather ends up in that ground too. He comes back, of course. A grotesque mockery of fatherhood that makes Drew’s life measurably worse.
It’s a messy film, no question, but its story of angst, loss and desperation caught me completely off guard when I finally gave it a chance. The original gripped me in a way that still reverberates, but the sequel still had plenty to say. -Pop
Pet Sematary Two arrived on home video this week in 1993, after an August 28th, 1992 theatrical release.