Pet Sematary Two

PET SEMATARY TWO
(R, Paramount, 100 mins., theatrical release date: Aug. 28, 1992)

Campier yet chillier than its predecessor, Pet Sematary Two allows returning director Mary Lambert to replay what was once tragedy mostly for laffs. The Stephen King mill having exhausted itself by 1992, the original author/scriptwriter opted to debase himself with the screenplay for Sleepwalkers, leaving Lambert and new blood Richard Outten (with revisions from David S. Goyer) to fashion this mercenary sequel directly for teen boys, as Lambert herself was fascinated by the ridiculous motivations of the adolescent mind. That mythic patch of dirt which undid Louis Creed and his family now becomes populated with not just unfairly deceased family, but also a couple of accidental stiffs who were already reprehensible to begin with and are foolishly re-animated to deter homicidal suspicion. Lambert spins a nasty twist on the original thesis that "dead is better," even if at the expense of humanity and intelligence.

Lambert's not-so-unusual approach here is fitting with what horror had largely become in the early 1990s, especially in regards to sequels. Like the sixth Freddy venture and the third outings for both Pinhead and Chucky, the monsters are incorrigible wise-crackers who offer mocking bemusement as well as beheadings. When a zombiefied cop stalks after his prey, he reads the Miranda rights with a perverse addendum to each statement. Hellhounds die at inopportune moments ("I was building a doggie door!"), one victim's callous justification is parroted with demented relish and a ghoul takes a bullet only to wince and mutter "I hate it when that happens." The makers of those aforementioned rehashes, however, don't have Lambert's impressive c.v. in music videos, as it was she who made four of Madonna's earliest and most striking MTV touchstones, including "Like a Virgin" and "Like a Prayer."

What Lambert does with these credentials is to, so as to cater to teen boys, make overkill herself by amping up the sadism and the soundtrack to numbing degrees. It isn't enough now to rely on a single dead cat, a box of tabbies and a pen full of bunnies and one white wolfhound (twice}must all be sacrificed in provocatively gory tableux. The town bully threatens to gnaw a peer's nose off with a motorbike wheel, and will turn up later with a literal axe to grind. And alt-rock cult heroes such as The Jesus & Mary Chain ("I wanna die just like Jesus Christ") and L7 (the same song which later introduced us to Mickey & Mallory) blare over the carnage, with Dramarama, Traci Lords and Patti Smith disciple Jan King providing incidental support. The Ramones chose not to grace us with a "Pet Semetary" sequel of their own and instead donated "Poison Heart," the first single from the Mondo Bizarro LP which premiered the Tuesday following the movie's release.

Edward Furlong, fresh off his T2 fame, plays central character Geoff Matthews while Anthony Edwards, soon to transition from Northern Exposure to ER, is Jeff's veterinarian father, Dr. Chase Matthews. Estranged in the wake of a separation, the two reunite after the freak, fatal electrocution of Jeff's mother and Chase's wife Renee Hallow (Darlanne Fluegel), a B-list actress, on the set of her latest project. With Renee's funeral held in her hometown of Ludlow, Maine, Dr. Matthews decides to move there to help his grieving son and set up his own practice. At the dilapidated kennel, Geoff befriends Drew Gilbert (Jason McGuire), the obese stepson of surly sheriff Gus (Clancy Brown) and caretaker of a Siberian husky named Zowie. At school, Geoff is singled out for abuse by brawny Clyde Parker (Jared Rushton), who misses not a single chance to mock the recently deceased mom.

Clyde takes Geoff and Drew on a ride to the pet cemetery, which will come in handy when Gus, fed up with Zowie spooking his rabbits, fells Drew's beloved pooch with his rifle. Burying Zowie in the cursed soil over the hill, the canine returns to the Gilbert household with glowing eyes and his lethal wound still gaping. As Dr. Matthews comes to realize the truth about Zowie's condition while tending to him, a Halloween beer blast Clyde throws in the woods is broken up by Gus, who attacks Drew before getting his throat ripped out by Zowie. Naturally, Drew buries his stepdad in the Indian graveyard, which turns out to be a huge mistake. And all the while Geoff ponders what it would be like if mommy were still alive, even with the strange behavior of Zowie and Gus becoming ghastlier.

The original Pet Sematary was not one of the better Stephen King adaptations, even if King himself was responsible for its onscreen translation. The central performances were uninspiring, the story stripped down to the point of losing Gothic credibility and Mary Lambert's stylistic acumen was heavy-handed. Pet Sematary Two falls prey to the very same traps. The tragedy of the Matthews family is effectively overpowered by the gruesome shenanigans of the latter half of the movie. And some of these vignettes stop the film dead itself, particularly a blue-rinse erotic nightmare Chase has involving Renee as well as an aimless rape scene between the revived Gus Gilbert and his passive wife Amanda (Lisa Waltz). Edward Furlong and Anthony Edwards are directed to play their roles with more one-dimensional solemnity than repressed warmth. Unlike John Connor, there's very little bratty spark in Geoff Matthews for Furling to ignite. Edwards, now with thinning hair and full beard, loses the personable charms of his best roles from the past decade, from Gilbert to Goose to Harry Washello (from Miracle Mile).

While Jason McGuire is a fitting doppelganger for Stand by Me-era Jerry O'Connell, Pet Sematary Two's only actors of fascination are those playing  the figurative heavies. Jared Rushton, best remembered as Josh Baskin's best friend from Big, has the bleached hair and simmering malevolence of a junior Chris Penn, and is every bit as alluringly despicable as Kiefer Sutherland was in his early career. And then there's Clancy Brown, who is suitably unsettling whether in mundane domestic affairs (he likes rationalizing his brutish side within the verbal contexts of frustrated dad and macho officer) or murderous supernatural antagonism. He looks comparatively thinner and less hulking as Gus than when he played Viking in Bad Boys (his screen debut from 1983) or the Kurgan of Highlander, but the sadistic gleam in Brown's eyes is preserved by Lambert's camera. Lambert and Outten proceed to make black comic hash out of King's inaugural premise, but the anarchic glee Clancy Brown offers in return justifies the burlesque.

One three-minute chunk of the movie in particular drips with some of the finest ham any disposable '90s gorefest has to offer. It is the showdown between Dr. Matthews and Gus, who has dug up Renee's corpse for unspeakable reasons and offers it to Geoff so that he may realize his wildest wish of an impractical family reunion. The very power drill Gus has been using in his charnel workshed to build that doggie door for Zowie comes in handy to intimidate Dr. Matthews: "No brain, no pain! Think about it." That Gus himself dies again is inevitable, but that doesn't set you up for the hilarious way in which he drops to the floor. Save for a stretch before the final credits which can be interpreted either as a ridiculously sentimental farewell for the film's victims or a joke on Orson Welles, Clancy Brown's confidently twisted performance in Pet Sematary Two reminds me of that classic Bo Diddley line: "I got a tombstone hand and a graveyard mind." It's a shame Lambert, Outten and the rest of the cast fail to heed such inspiration.

Shoot to Kill

SHOOT TO KILL
(R, Touchstone Pictures, 110 mins., theatrical release date: Feb. 12, 1988)

A pip of an opening sequence heralds the decade-long comeback of the Civil Rights era's leading man in Roger Spottiswoode's Shoot to Kill. On a sleepy San Franciscan night, a jewelry heist bursts onto the scene, the perp revealed as the store's owner, Mr. Berger, undisguised and still in his evening dress. In walks Sidney Poitier as Special Agent Warren Stantin, a G-Man of 22 years experience, to suss out the reason for Mr. Berger's jittery self-theft: someone is pointing a gun at his wife, having previously shot their dog, and is demanding two pounds of stones or else. To prove he's not bluffing, the faceless criminal lets the maid out of the Berger's mansion in plain view of Agent Stantin and the SWAT team, and pops her just as ruthlessly.

Stantin submits to the gunman's demands whilst taking a sniper for back-up, though once they've driven out to the pier, Stantin is left with another dead body, that of Mrs. Berger, and a fugitive who has successfully eluded his tail. This instills a determination in both parties as one flees north towards Washington and the Canadian border, the other struggling to identify the cleverly-concealed psycho on the slimmest of descriptions. It will get worse once Stantin receives a report of a fisherman's death in Bishop Falls, murdered in the same manner as Mrs. Berger and all of his clothes stolen as the thrill-killer blends himself in with the slain sportsman's wilderness expedition.

This looks like a job for the man we once called Mr. Tibbs, but is indeed Sidney Poitier in his first starring role since 1977's A Piece of the Action, his third partnership with Bill Cosby and his fifth time behind the camera, to boot. Those lighthearted capers, which also included Uptown Saturday Night and Let's Do It Again, showed Poitier attempting to break away from the steely prestige he was associated with, an iconoclastic populism Poitier carried on when he limited himself to directing in the ten year hiatus from acting. But his frustratingly spotty track record, which peaked with Stir Crazy and would go on to include such stiffs as Hanky Panky and Ghost Dad, created a longing for Poitier's greatest gift to cinema: his very own unmistakable presence.

Being 1988, Sidney Poitier came back to a Touchstone-distributed action programmer where he shared top billing with rising star Tom Berenger, whose post-Platoon glories are as inconsistent as Poitier's directing credentials, but acquits himself well under the circumstances as much as the returning Poitier. Berenger is wild man Jonathan Knox, a guide-for-hire whose girlfriend Sarah Rennell (Kirstie Alley) just so happens to be leading the hiking quintet which includes the clandestine killer. Agent Stantin, having never roughed it once in his metropolitan life, demands Knox's assistance to prevent a vigilante rap, the solitary tracker knowing full well Stantin is going to slow him down.

Sarah's out there, though, with four happy-go-lucky tourists and one impostor, though in a shrewd display of casting, the expedition is a rogues' gallery of venerable character actors. Who can it be? Is he Andrew Robinson, who cuts the widest swath in unsettling villainy by his association with Dirty Harry and Hellraiser? Or Richard Masur, who was in Spottiswoode's Under Fire as the spokesman for El Presidente and also once perverted Dana Hill's innocence in the 1981 TV movie Fallen Angel? I thought I recognized the late Frederick Coffin, a.k.a. "Holden McGuire," as Ike, the orange-haired yokel ("Disco's stupid!") from the eternally skeevy Mother's Day! And just where do I even start with Clancy Brown! Poor Kevin Scannell (Turner & Hooch) is the odd man out, but that can throw one off, just as well.

I will refrain from spoilers (thanks for nothing, Touchstone Home Video!) except for one minor reveal: It isn't Richard Masur. His recently-divorced Norman is the only supporting role written with deliberate red herring traits (he shares an elevated cart over a gorge with Kirstie Alley and queries about her boyfriend's potential for jealousy), but Masur is too endearingly anxious to come off as a threat, even if Fallen Angel, which was directed by the same man who gave me the Moon Goddess of Summer Girl, proved otherwise.

When the villain inevitably outs himself, he sends the rest of the men plummeting to their rocky doom, the better for Alley's Sarah to guide him to the border without incident. At the same time, Stantin and Knox have their own reluctant game of "follow the leader" to navigate, and it's not without danger, either. Take the aforementioned conveyor cart, which the killer has sabotaged by jamming a large trunk in the clutch. Knox has to climb the rope from one side of the gorge to the other, which is scary enough given the distance below him, only to make it halfway there before the trunk comes loose and the cart slides down and knocks him off the rope. Hurtled violently against the cliffs, Knox has to rely on Stantin using all the strength in his aging body to hoist him back up to safety.

Spottiswoode and cinematographer Michael Chapman (who also plays a minor role as lawyer for the diamonds broker whom the villain keeps in touch with) create for that first 40-odd minutes leading up to the killer's reveal an efficient genre pastiche with pure currents of dry humor (e.g.: a fried marmot dinner between Knox and Stantin), gut-twisting set pieces and Poitier jumping back in the saddle with both his authoritative charisma and his overlooked comic timing intact. Once Sarah becomes hostage, though, the script becomes a protracted grind in which those once consistent pleasures are reduced to fleeting embers.

Shoot to Kill's confidence goes so downhill that the movie doesn't even conclude in those treacherous natural environs, with a literal cop-out on land which belabors the inevitable scene of déjà vu involving Poitier aiming his gun at the madman, once again using a human shield. The slickness finally becomes helplessly transparent and the script is revealed for the shambles it is. And then you start questioning the killer, whose frightening intelligence at the start is bogged down by formula dunderheadedness which makes you wonder if he has any real accomplices ("my men" he refers to at the start), why he's keeping Sarah alive given his hair-trigger temper and just what happened to his lethally calm aim when the bullets start firing in all directions.

Suffice to say that whichever of the line-up (Scorpio, Ike, the Kurgan, the Other Guy) is our baddie, it ends up being a waste of one man's evident talent. Or all of them, including Masur. And perhaps even spunky, endangered Kirstie Alley.

Poitier and Berenger, though, are given enough action and rapport so that Shoot to Kill becomes entirely watchable thanks to them. The manhunt eventually becomes a chore to sit through, but Knox cracking wise about Stantin's newfound ruggedness as well as the immortal grizzly encounter show glimmers of life which kept me interested despite the script, which originates with story writer Harv Zimmel (a real-life outdoorsman) but also includes touch-ups from Michael Burton (Flight of the Navigator) and, most pertinently, formula action specialist Daniel Petrie Jr. (Beverly Hills Cop, Toy Soldiers). There's a single comic-relief allusion to Stantin's racial identity, and Knox has but one zinger about "mountain boys" as he tries to warm up Stantin's body during a blizzard. Mostly, it's a battle of persistence that is highly entertaining up until the domesticated final stretch.

Shoot to Kill winds up with its barrel jammed once there is no more Pacific Northwest to take in. But for the excitement our then-60-year-old Sidney Poitier inspires, it's fairly irresistible. Do note that the film's international title was changed and that, in this particular trailer, there is a line which doesn't appear in the movie, just to deter you from suspecting a cross between The Defiant Ones and Survival Quest.