Pet Sematary Two

WHY THIS MOVIE (things written before watching Pet Sematary Two):

Edward Furlong and Anthony Perkins I think of in roughly the same way. It's to do with creepy sexiness and troubled interiors. They're pretty boys who seem broken in some vague way.

In real life they never achieved huge success but starred in famous movies. They add a quality of incompleteness to the characters they play, and their incompleteness seems related to a kind of existential misery and an overabundance of feelings. Like they're too trapped in themselves to be what other people want them to be. When they're on screen I feel somehow close to them. They're actors I identify with to a degree I feel uncertain about because I've never investigated their real world lives, it could be total fantasy. What I'm describing is how I feel when I see them in movies.

Pet Sematary Two was directed by Mary Lambert. Thankfully. Like Barbara Peeters with Humanoids from the Deep, or Kathryn Bigelow with Near Dark and Point Break, Lambert is a female who treasures the particulars of masculine pop movies. Lambert gets it. She gets what's fun and interesting about horror movies, and she imprints her strong personality onto the movie, offering contributions to the horror vernacular. This is cool because it means she's not trying to outdo horror movies, or whatever, i.e. she's not placing herself above the tradition, but instead she's trying to make an interesting and good horror movie. And the reader of Inner Genre knows I love love when an outsider interprets Hollywood formula because the outsider, if confident with oneself, will invariably expose interesting and exciting details about the outsider and about the formula.

Lambert also directed Pet Sematary One, a movie that is one of five movies that scared and scarred me as a child (the others being the original The Blob, original Night of the Living Dead, Leviathan, and a Nightmare on Elm Street movie not sure which one). And she directed early Madonna music videos, e.g. Material Girl, Like a Virgin, and Like a Prayer. Imagine if you were the person who directed those videos. I sincerely hope Lambert wakes up each morning feeling good about herself. She also directed an episode of the Rebel Highway series, but unfortunately I tired of the series before I made it to her episode.

THIS MOVIE (things written after watching Pet Sematary Two):

Cool.

Pet Sematary Two blends elements of teenager movies with horror movies, resulting in an emotionally charged and rock fueled movie.

Jeff Matthews (Edward Furlong) loses his mother and he and his father (Anthony Edwards) relocate to her hometown, which is the Pet Sematary town. Jeff is bullied in and out of school by badboy Clyde Parker (Jared Rushton) and has only one friend, chubby Drew Gilbert (Jason McGuire). Drew's stepfather Gus Gilbert (Clancy Brown) is the sheriff of the town and an asshole to Drew.

Pet Sematary Two made me think about Tamra Davis and Guncrazy because it used family drama as narrative impetus, bolstered emotional beats with rock music, implemented music video-like visual tools, showed compassion to the downtrodden, and piggybacked on an established genre. Then I thought about how Davis and Lambert both began their careers as music video directors and I began to see them as precursors to moviemakers like Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, and Richard Ayoade. Similar to contemporary David Fincher, Davis and Lambert's movies adhere somewhat closely to traditional ideas about movie form, while it seems later music video directors turned movie directors are more likely/expected to explore new methods of execution -- or more blatantly explore them. Interestingly, Alien³, Guncrazy, and Pet Sematary Two are all movies from 1992, and the first two were directorial debuts. Menace II Society was released in 1993. Was this the first wave of music video directors turned movie directors? I'll figure out a way to research that question and write about earlier examples if they exist. But this was definitely a wave.

The not-great news is I feel like genre formulas operate as restrictions in Lambert's Pet Sematary Two, and that the movie fails to escape the trappings of its genre. I had this problem with Guncrazy too. And I know that at the beginning of this piece I complimented Lambert on her affection for the horror genre and for not placing herself above the genre and now it seems like I'm contradicting myself maybe. Pet Sematary Two is a good movie even.

The thing that bothers me is the movie fails to answer essential questions about its characters because its loyalty is to genre above its characters and their emotions. And that's where it fails me. Richly layered and interesting characters can't help but interrupt the flow of a genre movie, and I think Pet Sematary Two begins to develop its characters and their unique motivations/desires, but ultimately abandons the complexity of their makeup for the safety of genre formula.

In this way I think my perspective differs from other genre fans who are more interested in tight narrative structure and traditional methods of storytelling. It can be said that themes and ideas are of more consequence than character and emotion -- and I don't fully disagree, it's possible for all these things to co-exist. But even a purist would probably be disappointed by Pet Sematary Two because its resolve is one-noted and its logic insular to the movie. It'd be hard to extract meaning or philosophical content from the movie's ending.

Although I'll say the movie has a nice last touch, a little tribute to the characters who died during the movie (not pictured).