Pet Sematary (1989)

Film: Pet Sematary (1989)

Stars: Dale Midkiff, Fred Gwynne, Denise Crosby, Miko Hughes

Director: Mary Lambert

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

All October long, The Many Rantings of John is running a marathon dedicated to the Horror classics of the 1960's-00's that I'm seeing for the first time this month.  If you want to take a look at past titles from previous horror marathons (both this and other seasons) check out the links at the bottom of this article.

Stephen King is an interesting conundrum for older filmgoers.  We have lived long enough with King that he's celebrated.  His books have been reevaluated to the point where he has won the National Medal of Arts and took the life achievement prize at the National Book Awards (much to Harold Bloom's chagrin).  But there was a time that a Stephen King movie was not greeted with critical hosannas, or at least intrigue.  In fact, at one point, King's name on a movie was kind of a invitation for a drubbing from the critics, even if the film made money.  A case of that is Pet Sematary, which in 1989 was a solid hit for Paramount, but was lambasted by critics like Gene Siskel & Leonard Maltin, who gave it their worst scores.  Watching it, I both understand (based on what we value in films today) it has gotten a reappraisal...and also think that Siskel & Maltin had a point when it was first released.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about a small town in Maine, where Louis (Midkiff) & Rachel (Crosby) have moved with their children, including younger son Gage (Hughes) in hopes of having a quiet life where Louis will serve as a small-town doctor.  They meet their unusual neighbor Jud Crandell (Gwynne), who shows them the local Pet Cemetery (the name is misspelled on the sign, and thus in the title for this picture).  Their daughter is worried that her cat will end up in the pet cemetery, and indeed, the cat is run over, which is when some of the nonsense starts.  Jud takes Louis to an ancient Indian burial ground, one where if you bury the dead, they'll come back to life...but in a demonic form.  He doesn't tell him about the demonic form thing until after, of course, and we soon see the cat trying to attack Louis, now with glowing eyes.  Shortly, after, Gage is also killed by a truck, and killed.  Instead of letting him stay dead, Louis sneaks to the burial ground and buries Gage...and in this case he comes back as a demon child, one who kills both Rachel & Jud before Louis kills him.  In the coda of the film, Louis then buries Rachel...who comes back and kills him in the film's final scene.

Here's where I have to out myself a little bit with maybe my biggest pet peeve as a film-watcher, even if the pet peeve isn't entirely fair to the filmmakers: I hate when stupidity is a plot device.  In real life, people are perpetually stupid-we all make mistakes that make no logical sense, and we all know people who continually make bad decisions.  But in a movie, I always find it a bit cheap.  And that's what this movie is-it's pretty cheap.

Take Jud for example.  Why, exactly, having known that both a man and a dog being buried in the cemetery resulted in them being possessed, did he even offer to Louis that this was an option for the cat?  The excuse in the film is that his daughter wasn't ready for death...but he knew the solution was clearly worse.  It'd be like running a lawn mower you know the blade is loose on just because you gotta mow the lawn-it's so stupid!  And the rest of the movie continues this.  Louis & Rachel are terrible parents, as not once but twice they let their toddler son play unsupervised near a road.  Listen, parents are judging on a different scale in the 1980's, but I was Gage's age in the 1980's, and I can promise you-my parents wouldn't have let me play anywhere near a highway or road like that (I wasn't allowed more than 100 feet from the main highway on our family farm even when I was much older than Gage).  It's insane how many things in this movie are preventable, and while some of the performances are fun (specifically Gwynne), and the visuals are great (not just the creepy cemetery, but also Dale Midkiff naked in a bath tub), it does not make up for the fact that there's something clearly missing in translation from King's novel and this movie. 

1920's: The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera

1930's: The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Dracula, Dracula's Daughter, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Invisible Man, Mad Love, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Raven, Son of Frankenstein, Werewolf of London

1940's: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Cat People, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Dracula, The House of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Invisible Man's Revenge, The Invisible Woman, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Invisible Agent, The Mummy's Curse, The Mummy's Ghost, The Mummy's Hand, The Mummy's Tomb, Phantom of the Opera, She-Wolf of London, Son of Dracula, The Uninvited, The Wolf Man

1950's: Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, The Blob, Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Creature Walks Among Us, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, It Came from Outer Space, Revenge of the Creature

1960's: The Devil Rides Out, The Innocents, The Masque of the Red Death, Night of the Living Dead,Village of the Damned

1970's: The Amityville Horror, Black Christmas, Carrie, Dawn of the Dead, Don't Look Now, Halloween, The Hills Have Eyes, The Omen, Phantom of the Paradise, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, When a Stranger Calls, The Wicker Man

1980's: Altered States, An American Werewolf in London, The Changeling, Child's Play, The Evil Dead, The Fly, The Fog, Friday the 13th, Gremlins, Hellraiser, The House on Sorority Row, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Poltergeist, Poltergeist II: The Other Side, Sleepaway Camp, The Thing

1990's-Present: Arachnophobia, The Blair Witch Project, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Candyman, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Paranormal Activity, Scary Movie, Scream

Road House (1989)

Film: Road House (1989)

Stars: Patrick Swayze, Kelly Lynch, Sam Elliott, Ben Gazzara, Kevin Tighe

Director: Rowdy Herrington

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Sam Elliott: click here to learn more about Mr. Elliott (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As you may have gathered over the past two weeks, Sam Elliott would never be Clint Eastwood or John Wayne.  In a Hollywood increasingly uninterested in movie westerns, Elliott didn't really have a place as a leading man, and though he was uniquely handsome and tall, in the 1980's against "prettier" leading men like Richard Gere & Mel Gibson, he didn't fit the times.  He had a lot of success doing B-Grade western miniseries (which were hot at the time), but in terms of the movies this meant that for much of the decade, Elliott transitioned into the role of in-demand character actor, and ended up a few rungs down the call sheet to a number of big names, including Cher (Mask) and Whoopi Goldberg (Fatal Beauty).  He even played second banana to one of those leading man/pretty boys in today's film, Road House, where Elliott portrays a bouncer-mentor to a high-kicking Patrick Swayze.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film stars Swayze as James Dalton, a professional "cooler," a term for a bouncer who runs security at a club and makes sure that its clients don't fight & stay safe.  He's hired by a restaurant owner Frank Tilman (Tighe, who is so entrenched in my memory for his villainous role on Lost I kept expecting him to be a secret bad guy) to come to a town in Missouri to solve the problems of his restaurant, but there's a problem.  The town is run by local crime boss Brad Wesley (Gazzara), who doesn't like Dalton, and is intent on running him out of town if he won't work for him.  Meanwhile, Dalton falls in love with a blonde doctor Elizabeth Clay (Reilly), who doesn't know what Wesley knows-that Dalton has a past, including where he ripped out a man's throat, supposedly in self-defense, but the audience understands Dalton has some rage issues.  When his mentor Wade (Elliott) comes to town & they fight Wesley's men, it becomes a standoff between the two, with Wesley running his monster truck through a local car dealership, setting a man's house on fire, and killing Wade just to "teach Dalton a lesson."  The film ends with the townspeople killing Wesley as he attempts to murder Dalton, finally standing up for themselves.  And after the murder, they all go back to the bar to celebrate.

To say Road House is stupid is to really undersell what this film will do to your brain cells.  If you're a Millennial, you probably know this movie less from Swayze's original film (which was a modest hit in 1989 and had a long shelf life on VHS), and more so from it being mocked on Family Guy, where Peter takes on the role of Dalton & starts roundhouse kicking everyone to get his way.  This...is exactly the plot of Road House (and much funnier than anything in the actual movie).  The film makes no sense.  In real life, someone as villainous as Wesley, especially in 1989, would be arrested by the FBI, certainly after running a monster truck through a car dealership with dozens of eye witnesses in broad daylight (by far the stupidest scene in the movie).  Not to mention, it's not clear why Dalton literally lets Wade get murdered for no reason, not warning he or Elizabeth that Wesley threatened their lives.  The plot to this movie looks like you took a battering ram through the script, it makes so little sense.

That said, while it's the dumbest movie I've seen in a long time, it's not the worst.  Swayze is gorgeous (as is Reilly), but their acting is so bad I found myself cackling at the over-seriousness of it.  The only person that's having much fun onscreen is Elliott, who plays his horny, whiskey-grizzled mentor role with a lot of humor.  At one point he unzips his pants to show a scar to Reilly's character (and in the process, exposes his pubic hair), and the film plays it as such a rizz-induced joke that it kind of works.  He's not in enough of the film to make it properly enjoyable, but he saves it from being bargain-basement action garbage.

OVP: Shirley Valentine (1989)

Film: Shirley Valentine (1989)
Stars: Pauline Collins, Tom Conti, Julia McKenzie, Alison Steadman, Joanna Lumley, Sylvia Syms, Bernard Hill
Director: Lewis Gilbert
Oscar History: 2 nomination (Best Actress-Pauline Collins, Original Song-"The Girl Who Used to Be Me")
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

In 1989, the Oscars had a lot of choices for their fifth nomination for Best Actress.  The Academy could've gone with a beautiful breakout star in a Best Screenplay nominee (Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally or Andie MacDowell in sex, lies, and videotape), or a past nominee in the category in a populist hit (Sally Field in Steel Magnolias or Kathleen Turner in War of the Roses) or even an international icon in a film getting awards season buzz (Isabelle Huppert in Story of Women or Liv Ullmann in The Rose Garden).  Instead, though, the Academy decided to pick a movie starring an actress they'd likely never heard of in a film that made little money, and was a strangely-translated adaptation of a Tony-winning play.  This is where we're going next in our week devoted to Best Actress, where Pauline Collins won her (to date) only Oscar nomination in Shirley Valentine.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Shirley Valentine (Collins), a housewife in Liverpool who is bored of her life, suffering a bit from empty nest syndrome with her husband, whom she has grown cold with (though it's not so much a loveless marriage as one where love used to be stronger).  She has few friends, and spends a lot of her time talking to a wall as a bit of therapy to understand her life.  In the first half of the film, we learn about her backstory, meet her smattering of chums, and see the listless existence she's in, until her friend Jane (Steadman) proposes a trip to Greece for them.  Shirley initially refuses, but after meeting her old friend Marjorie (Lumley), a former schoolmate who is now a high-end prostitute, and seeing how happy she is even in an unconventional life, Shirley up-and-leaves her husband (she tacks a post-it on a poster of Greece in their pantry as a goodbye), and heads to Greece with Jane, who promptly leaves her to have an affair with a man.  After feeling lonely, Shirley decides to invest herself in the culture & also has an affair with Costas (Conti), a local businessman.  Shirley afterwards abandons Jane at the airport, runs back to Costas (only to find that he pulls this line with traveling women all of the time), and decides that they can be professional partners rather than lovers, and asks if she can stay in Greece.  The movie ends ambiguously, with her husband Joe (Hill) coming to Greece to chat with a now-changed Shirley, with us to wonder if they stay together.

The movie in some respects is a pretty standard-fare "midlife crisis in a foreign country" trope.  We've seen this before (When Stella Got Her Groove Back, Under the Tuscan Sun, Eat Pray Love, etc), though with Collins we have a slightly different take-this isn't a woman who is conventionally considered beautiful by cinematic standards like Angela Bassett or Diane Lane, and Collins is willing to give us the sadness of this woman's ordinary life.  We see the disappointment in how Shirley was dismissed from a young age when she had dreams, and how she was worth more than what most people considered of her.  There's a good movie lying in Shirley Valentine, and I especially get why this was a moving play, particularly since this is a one-character show (Collins would tell the stories that we see played by other actors in the movie)-Collins understands the character well, and gives her both an optimism we don't normally see in this situation, as well as a sadness that we know she's never going to recover her youth completely, but that she understands she still has time to live the life she wishes.

But Collins performance is marred by a truly terrible plotting device that they holdover from the play-her repeated attempts to break the fourth wall.  Initially I thought I was just confused by this (I thought she was talking to the dog), and at one point the character admits to talking to the "fourth" wall (literally-it's a wall that has until-this-point been offscreen).  This is a terrible decision-it takes us out of the performance & the film all the time as we have Shirley-the-narrator underlining the feelings of what Pauline Collins is attempting to do with her face and actions.  It ruins the film, which could have been interesting, and basically destroys her performance by making it unnecessary. Narration is always hard in a movie, but here in particular it's exhausting because it becomes expositional, as if we're having the character reexplain what we've just seen.  The film's other nomination for Best Song is a moody, sad ballad that fits the film but is also such a languid piece of music from the Bergmans that I prayed it wouldn't be a constantly recurring theme to the film (thankfully it wasn't-just the front & end credits), but it's a bizarre to me that such a stylized, offbeat performance in a botched adaptation got nominated over the actresses I name-checked above, particularly Ryan & MacDowell, who were giving breakthrough performances which Oscar usually clings to in this category (and despite major stardom, both actresses likely will never win Oscar nominations as a result).