It: Chapter Two (2019)

Directed by: Andy Mucshietti

Notable cast: James McAvoy, Jessica Chastain, Bill Hader, Bill Skarsgård, Isaiah Mustafa, Jay Ryan, James Ransone, Andy Bean

It: Chapter Two serves as a really good reminder of why people remember and celebrate the childhood half of the story. That may seem harsh, but if anything, this movie does deserve praise for making the material as interesting as it’s possible to make it. The adaptation of the story and some of its more esoteric elements are at the very least bold and interesting. I’m a long-time devoted King reader, and I grew up with the Tim Curry miniseries, but I’m going to take this film strictly on its own merit. For a record of my potential bias, the miniseries doesn’t really hold up, and probably wasn’t that good in the first place, and the book is definitely upper tier King but admittedly kind of a mess. Especially the ending…

Pet Sematary (2019)

Directors: Kevin Kölsch, Dennis Widmyer

Notable Cast: Jason Clarke, Amy Seimetz, John Lithgow, Jeté Laurence, Hugo Lavoie, Lucas Lavoie, Obssa Ahmed, Alyssa Brooke Levine

Before leaping into 2019’s latest entry into the Stephen King renaissance, it’s perhaps best to start by laying the groundwork and context towards how I feel about the original Pet Sematary material. The book is terrifying, dark, and heavy, although it is hardly perfect (that’s blasphemy, I know,) it’s also a powerful story that is ripe for cinematic elements. The first Pet Sematary film from 1989 is even further away from perfection, utilizing some great atmosphere and terrifying imagery to power through a script that is massively problematic and muddled with needless subplots. The reason it’s necessary to know this is because this newest version of Pet Sematary certainly assumes its audience has either a) see the previous film b) read the book or c) both. In many ways, it plays on the expectations of the audience by playing up or down certain elements to get the audience to feel or move in a certain way. Like a lot of things in the Pet Sematary universe, this plays out as a blessing and a curse. Like its dual source material, this film struggles to find perfect balance of scares to narrative theme and ultimately stumbles further into a middle of the road approach than expected. Pet Sematary is still a thoughtful and often dark decent into the meaning (or meaninglessness?) of death with some impactful moments, but it just doesn’t reach the heights that it might have in the end.

Creepshow 2 (1987)

Director: Michael Gornick

Notable Cast: George Kennedy, Dorothy Lamour, Frank Salsedo, Holt McCallany, David Holbrook, Don Harvey, Dan Kamin, Paul Satterfield, Jeremy Green, Daniel Beer, Page Hannah, Lois Chiles, Tom Wright, Stephen King, Tom Savini

The original Creepshow remains one of the cornerstones to the horror anthology, a format that has seen a revival in recent years that very obviously uses the style and lessons of the George Romero/Stephen King collaboration as a blueprint, but the second film in the series tends to carry a lot of baggage with it as being a massive disappointment. With the recent re-release of Creepshow 2 on Blu Ray in the US via Arrow Video though, I hope that fans of the original give this film another shot. That’s because, while it isn’t as good as the original one and it is flawed overall, it’s not nearly as horrendous as many of the reviews of it would indicate. I think it’s due time that most horror fans and cult cinephiles give it another shot and there is not a better time to do it than with this latest version that sees the film in its best form in a long, long time.