BEFORE: Well, I'm still feeling let down by "Cujo" - the dog wasn't possessed by an evil spirit, he wasn't a hellhound, he just had the rabies. Ho hum. But now that it's the day before Halloween and pets are going to start rising from their graves, my timing is starting to look impeccable. And I've got four zombie-related films scheduled to follow this one.
I know I had a linking in mind here - ah yes, Dee Wallace from "Cujo" was also in the film "10" with Denise Crosby. Go figure that one out.
THE PLOT: Behind a young family's home in Maine is a terrible secret that holds the power of life after death. When tragedy strikes, the threat of that power soon becomes undeniable.
AFTER: Like "Cujo", this one has a very real-world jumping off point - beloved pets being run down by giant tractor trailers. But if the pets are so beloved, why were they left outside in the first place? There's just no reason to let any pet, dog or cat, run around free at night. Cats that live completely indoors live a lot longer, for many reasons beyond traffic accidents.
Or, if you care about your cat, maybe build a fence between your property and the highway? Because I guess then we wouldn't have a movie about zombie cats. You have to have a dead cat before you can have a zombie cat.
Anyway, this touches on a number of Stephen King tropes, and remember, I'm classified as an expert on his films now - we've got the small Maine town with the dark secret, a kid who has psychic visions or prophetic dreams (as in "The Shining"), and spirits from beyond the grave that possess things (like the car in "Christine", only here it's a cat).
There's also the classic horror macguffin - the Old Indian Burial Ground. Bodies go in, and then climb back out, which makes you wonder why there aren't a bunch of 300-year old Native Americans walking around. Ah, I get it, the body you put in the ground may come back out, but not with the soul it had to begin with. The ground is "sour" and the soul of a man's heart is stonier, or something.
The problem is, when you go back to the beginning of the film and think about who knew what about the graveyard in the beginning, and what the implications might be of burying something (or someONE) there, this plot makes no sense. Why would this well-intentioned yokel put forth the notion of resurrecting an animal, if he KNEW that you don't get out of it what you put into it? He knows what the consequences are, and yet the plan moves ahead anyway. That's just dumb.
Furthermore, the plot gets complicated with all this extraneous rubbish - there's the wandering spirit who's trying to put things right, but he's rather ineffectual since he can only be seen by E.R. doctors and, for some reason, car-rental clerks. Then there's the woman who helps the family with their laundry, and her fate seems unconnected to the rest of the film in any way. Then we learn a family secret about another character, she's guilty over the way her family treated her dying sister. Gee, I wonder if that bit of random spoken information will become important later on in the film...
It all builds to an ending that's beyond silly, and for my money a horror film shouldn't have so much silliness in it, unless it's one of those parody films that takes down the whole genre, "Airplane"-style.
Also starring Dale Midkiff, Fred Gwynne, Brad Greenquist, Blaze Berdahl, Miko Hughes, Susan Blommaert, with a cameo from Stephen King himself as a minister.
RATING: 4 out of 10 headstones
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