2019's Pet Sematary remake plays like a film whose makers know you want to laugh at it, to giggle, and jump, and enjoy the sort of safe scares you’ve grown accustomed to after 30 years of rentals and basic-cable rewatches of the original. And eventually, after head-faking towards real drama and pathos, it shrugs, gives up, and gives permission: You may wallow in all this empty unpleasantness now! It invites you to sit with it, only to mischievously pull the chair out from under you and kick the bed across the room. It absolves itself of responsibility to Stephen King’s text in a cheap mixture of cliché and blood, and ends shortly thereafter, but not before nodding in self-satisfaction at how lazily it undoes itself just before cutting to black. by Bobby Roberts