Pet Sematary

Like its predecessors (though this time scripted by the author himself), Lambert's leaden, morbid, rather nasty adaptation of Stephen King's novel fails to solve the problem of visualising his complicated internal narratives: stripped of inner lives, the ordinary people who populate his books take on a flat cartoon-like quality. The story of Dr Louis Creed (Midkiff) and his efforts to revive his three-year-old son (Hughes), killed by one of the giant trucks that thunder past their new Maine home, is more like a sketchy outline than a finished work. No film about a scalpel-wielding three-year-old psycho zombie could be entirely devoid of shocks. But reams of tedious exposition, about a children's pet 'sematary' and the magical resurrecting properties of an Indian burial ground, stretch patience and credulity to their limits, while Lambert fails to exploit the potential of the novel's best set pieces. The stories told in flashback by Creed's wife (Crosby) and their elderly neighbour (Gwynne) also seem hopelessly contrived, arresting the book's page-turning plot without adding emotional or psychological depth.