It's a much better bad movie than the first one. It isn't often in Hollywood that a director gets the chance to go back and essentially remake a failed film but Lambert, refusing to let sleeping cadavers lie, gets the job done this time. [28 Aug 1992, p.50]
Pet Sematary II, which is too gruesome for grammar school youngsters and too easily laughed off for most high schoolers, ought to be a big hit among the junior high crowd. Not nearly as scary as the 1989 original, it nonetheless expresses and attempts to resolve in bold mythological terms the anxieties of being 13.
The first Pet Sematary was a good adaptation in that it followed the plot of the book very closely. Where it stumbled was in it's execution. Bad acting, poor direction, and some obviously terrible special effects plagued the experience. The results were a movie that could really only hold a place in the hearts of fans of the novel or the most forgiving of horror fans. This sequel sees Mary Lambert returning in the director's seat to revisit the concept. Only this time with an original plot that Stephen King didn't create. This time around what we get is far superior.
Lambert shows more talent behind the camera. The improved visual effects make the action much more believable. The original story isn't half-bad. It's a little darker and a little meaner than it's predecessor, while still carrying the same morbid tone. The biggest and most important improvement to be found in this sequel is the acting. The cast this time around proves much more talented than the last bunch. There's not a wooden performance among them. It's this kind of stuff that makes for a more respectable movie. One that has the potential to do more than just satisfy those who read the source material. It's a dark, harsh tale that may even be a little mean-spirited here and there. Yet the concept is still appealing and with Lambert stepping up her game as a director it's hard to not be pulled in. If you can get past the overall morbidity that was inherent in the book that lead to this movie's creation, there's a pretty great horror film to be found here. One with a solid story and characters you can actually care about. So in a sense it captures the spirit of the book better than the first movie did despite it being an actual direct adaptation of it. It feels more like an adaptation of a Stephen King story than most of the actual adaptations do.
Pet Sematary Two is about 50% better than its predecessor, which is to say it's not very good at all. The latest incarnation relies more on gore than genuine chills and is sorely lacking in subtlety.
Less pompous than Pet Sematary, this has moments of trashy vigour but is scuppered by a consistently wretched script, Mary Lambert's knee-jerk direction and the usual redundant sequel air of utter pointlessness.
PSTwo feels like an elongated Tales From the Crypt, though the annoying heavy-metal soundtrack sounds like seepage from Headbanger's Ball. The first time around, Lambert went for terror; this time, it's mostly hardy-har-horror.
Lambert relies so much on gore and mean-spiritedness that the actors can't help looking glum; they're clearly being ignored by a director who seems to have lost touch with all the human elements in the story. The movie is ultimately as lifeless as most of its characters end up being. [28 Aug 1992, p.28]
For all its many flaws, the original PET SEMATARY at least maintained a fidelity to its source novel; this one not only ignores the rules set up by the first movie but manages to contradict its own internal and dramatic logic as well.
This is the sequel to the 1989 film "Pet Sematary" and is another one of those sequels that I would gain from having never been made. Unlike the original film, which was able to prove satisfactory even without being good, this film is so strange, so absurd and so surreal that it never works well.
Everything happens a few years after the tragedy that shook the Creed family. After burying his mother, an actress who died in a strange accident while filming, young Jeff moves to the rural town of the first film, where he goes to live with his father. It's through an incident of school violence that he discovers the Pet Cemetery, which is later taken to the cursed indigenous cemetery behind. From here on, everything becomes as obvious, as predictable and as idiotic as possible, as they give life to the dead and suffer the predictable consequences of their actions.
The film was directed again by Mary Lambert, and it couldn't be worse. It is an absurd film, in which our notion of logic is challenged by the development of the script, increasingly dissociated from reality, to the point that some characters, like Jeff, seem to be living a dream or an illusion caused by narcotics. To make things even more unbearable, the film is slow and spends a lot of time on scenes that are perfectly expendable or that could have been shortened without major difficulties.
The cast has well-known names from the cinema of the nineties and I believe that the actors did the best they could under the circumstances. But the fact is that they received so bad material that they couldn't shine. This was the case with Edward Furlong, who was still at the time collecting the fruits of an excellent job in "Terminator 2". He's a decent actor and does the best he can, but the material that was given to him in this film is so bad that I think it's just luck that his career didn't end up buried here. With him, Anthony Edwards also did his best, but Clancy Brown did a much more interesting, lively and energetic job, bringing to life a policeman truly worthy of our hatred. Darlanne Fluegel and Lisa Waltz are not so interesting and truly seem to appear just for the sake of the script.
Technically, the film is as bad as it could be. Boring, slow, he has a faded and uninteresting cinematography, to which are added uninteresting sets and costumes. The most interesting and notable is, probably, the set used in the climatic scenes, with all the clothes, props and objects of the protagonist's deceased mother scattered everywhere. The visual and sound effects are also not brilliant.
Pet Semetary II manages to be both one of the worst sequels of all time and one of the most unnecessary. It's great fodder for late night marathons of horrible films, but has little entertainment value on it's own.