The world's cutest opossum is shivering on a stump in a made-up burial ground beyond which the dead shall rise! Who will help this opossum? Poor chilly opossum! Edward Furlong is consumed with grouchiness and surliness. He will not help the opossum! But his kitten may have met a horrid end! This is maybe the mostest of the grunge-era teen horror films. Everything is run-down and dirty and disused. If something can be rusty, it is rusty. Or scored, or marked with surly teen graffiti. No one looks happy. If they start to look happy, someone shoots them an ugly glare and they stop. The realness just won't stop. It can't stop. It will not stop. 'Pet Sematary II' starts…

Missing the opportunity to expand the mythos of its predecessor, Mary Lambert's "Pet Sematary Two" is a watchable but routine horror sequel. Instead of developing the robust and chilling narrative threads of the original film and novel, the sequel is content to just spew gore and jump scares. While those scares are related to the first film's notorious burial ground where the dead return to life, they are played out in service of a limited piece of work.

Placing a different family in the Maine setting of the original film, "Pet Sematary Two" rehashes plot points from "Pet Sematary" but neither builds on them nor takes them in interesting directions. People and animals die and, then, are brought back to…

This was always my favorite of the two films. It's not scary but it has a lot more texture and bizarre shit happening. It shares themes with two other favorites that I watched frequently in the early 90's. Wes Craven's New Nightmare and Hello Mary Lou Prom Night 2. There's the movie star Mom electrocution scene, she in particular has always reminded me of Mary Lou. I can't fully explain the New Nightmare connection, my child brain found some similarity between them and it stuck. Nightmares? Graveyards? Something like that.

All of the characters are memorable and well cast. Particularly Good Dad vs. Bad (step)Dad. Anthony Edwards as hot veterinarian making powerful statements in turtleneck sweaters. He has sexually confusing…

Film #23 of the 2017 Hooptober season.

I've seen films which others consider to be perplexing yet make a strange kind of sense to me. They even tend to come in a certain breed- I mean, you tell me what Troll 2, Nightmare City, and Troma's Evil Clutch all have in common. Of course... none of those films were produced from the creative viewpoint of being a sequel. Sequels in American film production are often saddled with the audience expectation that there is a continuity held over from the previous film which need be maintained. Though, in the case of Pet Sematary, there is no story left to facilitate a sequel. The bare minimum of remaining thread there involves us…

I remember catching this on cable as a kid and always watching it because the visuals were so good. So I recently rewatched this to see how it holds up, and I'm surprised to say this movie gets way more criticism that it deserves.

The practical effects were top notch. The performances were also a little better in this movie compared to the previous where it seemed like everyone was on lithium. Clancy Brown did a great job with the role of playing the abusive hardass obsessed with law, who turns into this hilarious killer. Anthony Edward's was great, and of course we got peak Edward Furlong fresh off his Terminator high.

As far as the critics saying the movie…

On one hand this totally lives up to being the poster-child of ‘bad ‘90’s’ horror’ but on the other I kinda feel we lost out on a whole series of Clancy Brown as murderous zombie Sherrif Gus being not Freddy with his one-liners.

The movie does take too long to get to the purposely goofy stuff though.  So you have to sit with like an hour of lame Stephen King-lite BS until Clancy Brown comes back from the dead *SPOILER* and we get him mega-acting and other weird fun stuff like Furlong’s dad about to do the nasty with a zombie dog but with his wife’s body(!).

There is at least one gem before we get to that though, a…