Dr. Louis Creed (Dale Midkiff), his wife (Denise Crosby), and their children move to rural Maine where his new neighbor, Jud Crandall (Fred Gwynne), tells Louis about the ancient Indian burial ground that brings the dead back to life.
Quick Review: Video director Mary Lambert decides the way to go with this Stephen King adaptation is to make it both humorless and senseless. Of course, I don’t want to ignore the foreshadowing of every plot development and the one-dimensional characters. Here is a film where a little girl’s cat gets run over, and I didn’t care. Then a toddler gets run over, and I didn’t care. Shouldn’t a film that’s centered around family loss make me care about these things? Of course I might care a bit more if these weren’t the stupidest people on Earth, people who are warned about the trucks on the road over and over yet ignore it. Then, there is the American Werewolf in London-like mutilated ghost. Must all King films have a voice of God to warn the characters of everything? The bad makeup/FX doesn’t help either (the toddler zombie is sometimes a plastic doll and the wife’s dying sister is obviously a man). Fred Gwynne does inject some life into this project, but it’s not enough. The slow crawl of the film does make it to something fairly creepy in the end, but it is far too late.