Pet Sematary

Director Mary Lambert, who cut her cinematic teeth on MTV, displayed little talent in her 1987 art-film feature debut Siesta. She offers even less in this exceptionally poor adaptation of the effective Stephen King novel. Scripted by King, the story has been reduced to an ever more horrifying series of events. The Creeds (Dale Midkiff and Denise Crosby) are a young, upwardly mobile couple, who move into a country house in Maine which, unfortunately, sits on a major truck route. Their neighbor Jud (Fred Gwynne) shows the Creeds a pet cemetery where children have been burying their pets--who have died by the gross under the wheels of speeding trucks. Eventually, Jud takes Louis Creed to the Indian burial ground which lies beyond the pet cemetery. Here, what is buried, returns to life. Only the ground is "sour", and the resurrected dead come back as tormented monsters. First the Creeds' cat gets flattened, and then their young son...and you can probably guess where this tasteless movie goes from there. The interesting psychological portrait of a family coming to terms with death--which was at the center of King's novel--is completely jettisoned here in favor of following a scalpel-wielding tyke as he alternately giggles and carves people up. Not recommended. (R. Pitman)