Review of Pet Sematary

Urg, it's only been however long but I'm already sick of hearing the praises of this stupid bland little movie! There's virtually nothing there, it's painfully average and half-assed as hell! Something that almost immediately bothered me about it was that everything in the first half felt horribly rushed and wafer thin, in terms of things like character development and motivations and characters that you actually cared about for that matter.. General buildup cohesion and emotional payoff of the story, pathos and all-important deeper dark themes of death grief horror and madness that the first movie integrated into the story and brought to the screen so well..this modern thing here to me doesn't come close to the original picture or book, oh no it does not! You know a lot of these reviews seem to me to consider this a better movie purely based on it being new, and that really makes me a little sad! Ok so I won't say that the acting was bad because it mostly wasn't, with the big exception for me being the distractingly Punch-like Jason Clarke, the guy is a horrible actor who has the emotional presence of a block and his interpretation of the Louis Creed character is just very off putting and not particularly even likeable at all.. In the vastly superior original, when Louis fails to save his little infant son in time from the truck on the pitch perfect sunny day that strangely made the event even more horrific? How he reacted, that scream? That was real mental anguish that you could feel and that hit you hard on display, this film had almost nothing to it in terms of emotional depth and grief you can feel, there wasn't any of the kind of all-consuming, maddening grief that would drive a father to dig up his own dead child to see here, he just did it without a second thought, there was no finesse or subtlety to it, the parents barely seem to grieve at all here, that felt rushed and tossed aside like everything else in order to get to the bloodshed, which by the way really wasn't anything to write home about.. On a positive it does have some solid performances, Jete Laurence was very impressive and she did her job perfectly, being sweet enough that you felt sad for her death and then effectively wicked and hateful enough that you were quite ready to see her die again! Very creepy moment with her and her dad when he's just cleaned her up after seeing her after her resurrection and he's lying next to her in bed and she speaks to him about what's in her head and where she's been after she died. I also thought it was a legit great moment when Rachel is nearly dead and the evil thing that was once her child is taunting her and she turns to her/it and says "Don't call me mommy, you're not my daughter, Elle's dead..." I loved that line, it really summed everything up and I could feel it because the damn movie actually slowed down for a moment and let me. Amy Seimetz I liked a lot too, she was really good and sympathetic. I love John Lithgow, he's always been nothing less than a class act as an actor...But he was no Jud Crandall. He did what he could with the role but he just immeasurably paled in comparison to the iconic performance of the late Fred Gwynne, that guy arguably MADE the original movie what it was, even I'll admit that. I didn't like the ending with the silly resurrected whole evil family all together and about to prey on poor little helpless Gage... That was just bonkers to me, what a trite and cheaply nasty way to end the movie. "Beep beep!" Nice. So it had potential and wasn't the worst remake that I've ever seen, but I'm not planning on seeing this again anytime soon, it was a weak movie that had no emotional or psychological weight to it, and even on it's own merit, Pet Sematary 2019 is nothing but another average horror remake that will never be as fondly thought of and remembered as the original classic still is thirty years on, and I suspect will in fact be largely forgotten soon enough. Go away dull soulless remake, die already 💀