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Dennis Gage bio page


Dennis grew up on a small family farm in northwestern Illinois. He started tinkering with cars
early on and purchased his first, a T-Bird, at age. He also played guitar and trumpet in a
variety of rock, folk, and school bands.

Upon graduation from high school, he went to North Central College in Naperville, Illinois where
he majored in both chemistry and physics. His undergraduate research in quantum physics
received an American Chemical Society award. He continued his automotive interest and,
through the course of his college years, owned a number of muscle and sports cars. He also
kept up his music, playing in local coffee houses.

After receiving his degree, Dennis took up the pedal steel guitar and started playing in countryrock
bands in the Chicago area. He has opened for acts such Charlie Daniels, Waylon Jennings
and Dr. Hook. However, after two years, Dennis decided to retire from the music scene and go
to graduate school.

He attended the University of Idaho, from which he received a Ph.D. in chemistry. While there,
Dennis became an avid climber and winter mountaineer. He also finally married his high school
sweetheart, Ellen.

Dennis accepted a position as a product development scientist at The Procter Gamble
Company in Cincinnati, Ohio. There he either worked on, or created, most of PGs food
products in the store including Pringles, with which he bears a striking resemblance to the
handlebar mustachioed character on the can. Dennis holds a number of patents on PG
products. Once again having some disposable income, Dennis got back to playing with classic
cars. This is also where he and Ellen had their three children.

After years at P&G, Dennis took a position as Director of Product Development at a Bristol-
Myers Squibb company in Evansville, Indiana where he led the development of Boost nutritional
energy drink, among other products. In he met the founder of the fledgling Bradley David
Productions, Inc., and he became co-owner of the company shortly thereafter. A My Classic
Car pilot series, hosted by Dennis, was developed for TNN and received strong ratings when it
aired on TNN in early. Based on this success, the show premiered as a weekly series on
TNN in January. After only months on the air, Dennis was selected by The Cable Guide
and Total Television as one of the SHot Faces of Cable for.

In the show moved to SPEED channel where it reaches over million households. Now
in production for its sixteenth season, My Classic Car is one of the highest rated programs on
the network. In addition, Dennis is the Executive Producer of the motorcycle television
programs, Corbin’s Ride On and Trippin’ on Two Wheels, and the reality series, Texas
Hardtails, as well as the independent film, November.

Dennis and his business partner received the Ernst Young Entrepreneur of the Year award for
Indiana in. Dennis also serves on the Board of Directors of the Specialty Equipment
Market Association (SEMA), as well as a number of academic and industry advisory boards.
In Dennis became sole owner of the production company and renamed it MadStache, Inc.
and with his own lifelong love of cars and motorcycles, he states, This has got to be the
ultimate job!


We Just Learned These Crazy Facts About My Classic Car Host Dennis Gage

My Classic Car is hosted by Dennis Gage. He is the mustachioed man who takes the audience for the ride and keeps everything fun with his enthusiasm for all things automotive. There is something for everyone, from local cruises to daily drivers to the fanciest car shows in the world. This car show can be informative and entertaining. Above all, it captures Dennis' love for cars. It started as a broadcast on TNN followed by Velocity. It is still produced by MadStache that has created Texas Hardtails and Corbin’s Ride On.

My Classic Car features major car events in the US but occasionally the host goes to other countries, including the United Kingdom and Canada. Many episodes focus on car collectors and celebrities. Every episode has a segment sponsored by Autogeek Garage, a source for auto accessories. We just learned these crazy facts about My Classic Car host Dennis Gage.

15 The TV Show Covers 13 Locations

imdb.com

According to Dennis Gage, My Classic Car airs 26 episodes per year and includes 13 broadcast locations. He tries to shoot 2 episodes in each location. One episode focuses on a car show and another focuses on a particular collector or a car. He says he gets hundreds of suggestions of places to visit.

RELATED: 15 Sickest Classic Cars Restored By Celebs

14 He Grew Up On A Farm

madstache.com

Dennis Gage grew up on a farm. There he played a guitar in different folk, rock and school bands. When he graduated from high school, he went to North Central College and majored in chemistry and physics. He even received an American Chemical Society award. This is when he bought his first muscle car.

13 Dennis Gage Goes Through All Business Offers

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Dennis Gage says "We look at everything that comes in. After 19 years on-the-air, I have shot in all 50 states, eight Canadian provinces and numerous European countries. I and my team try to maintain a geographic balance in developing each season's production schedule. This hobby is practiced everywhere and is for everybody."

12 He Played In A Country Rock Band

pancakesandskateboards.blogspot.com

When he got his degree, Dennis Gage took up a guitar and started playing in a country rock band in Chicago. After two years, he decided to retire from his hobby. He also worked on many PGs food products including Pringles. He even bears a resemblance to the mustachioed Pringles character.

11 He Knows Jay Leno

imdb. com

Quite possibly the most famous car collector Dennis Gage has ever profiled has been former "Tonight Show" host Jay Leno. He is the main subject of the My Classic Car DVD. Dennis Gage has a photo with Leno at the top of the Facebook page. The DVD is loved by automotive aficionados worldwide.

10 He Was Director Of Product Development For Bristol Myers Squibb

facebook.com

In the late 70s, Dennis Gage became director of product development for Bristol Myers Squibb. He spent 5 years visiting different countries. He was also juggling life as a father to 3 children. He was looking for a modeling school for his two daughters, and an agency suggested that he gives it a try, too.

9 The First My Classic Car Pilot Aired In 1996

mcall.com

In 1995, Dennis Gage met the founder of the Bradley David Productions. A couple of months later he became a co-owner of the company. A My Classic Car pilot was created for TNN. It received good ratings when it aired in 1996. The show has been premiering as a weekly series ever since.

RELATED: 15 Greatest Car Shows To Start Binging Now

8 He Is The Ultimate Enthusiast

racedeck.com

Dennis Gage says "People think I know so much about cars, but I’m not an authority. I’m the ultimate enthusiast. No one knows more about a car than the guy who owns it. I also made time to volunteer with SEMA." He is a vocal proponent of bringing more awareness to SEMA's mission.

7 He Owns MadStache

trippinontwowheelstv.com

Dennis Gage owns a production company MadStache. This company produces his most famous show, My Classic Car, as well as many motorcycle TV programs. The most successful examples include Trippin' on Two Wheels and Corbin's Ride On. He serves as executive producer for both shows. Many programs have been on the air for many years.

6 He Has An Impressive Car Collection

dailyturismo.com

Being a vehicle enthusiast, Dennis Gage has an impressive car and bike collection. In addition to a '63 Studebaker GT Hawk, '56 Lincoln Premiere, and '63 Thunderbird, he owns classic bikes, including a '69 BMW R60US and a '68 Moto Guzzi V7. He once said that he drives a Ford Taurus SHO.

5 Fire Destroyed His Home

youtube.com

In 2010, Dennis Gage had a rough Christmas. His home in southern Indiana caught fire and was destroyed. His wife and son were at home but managed to escape. Sitting next to his house is a garage, which is home for cars and bikes. Luckily, the garage also escaped fire without injuries.

RELATED: Ranking The 15 Best Car Show Hosts (And The 15 Cars That Got Them There)

4 He Has Won Many Awards

blacktopmagazine.com

Dennis Gage "has been the recipient of many honors, from awards for science in school and from the American Chemical Society to the ARMO Hall of Fame. But ask him about the SEMA Hall of Fame, and you will render him speechless." He is honored to be compared to legendary people like Carroll Shelby.

3 The Creepy T Car

freep.com

This is one of the craziest vehicles Gage has ever seen. The Creepy T is a car based on a model originally released in 1971. The car is 13 feet long and features a big skull for its body complete with red eyes. This vehicle is co-built by haunt enthusiasts Jim Wieme and Rucker Posey.

2 He Likes Bikes More Than Cars

trippinontwowheelstv.com

Dennis Gage's interests have always been centered on bikes, not cars. When he was 12, he got his first bike, the 50cc Honda Cub. He paid 90 bucks for it, and revved the engine to pop a wheelie. He said that at one point the bike stopped shifting, and he couldn't figure out why.

1 He Credits His Success To His Background

racedeck.com

Dennis Gage credits his success to his background. He said he couldn't figure out what he was doing and kept quitting to try something else. Gage applies his market analysis expertise to each episode, which draws positive responses. He also touches a national chord by putting emphasis on classic cars.

NEXT: Remember The Bugatti Type 57? Here’s Why Collectors Want It So Bad

cats died down, tail hazard ... and a bunch of spoilers in addition to

Karnosaur123

Article 16:10

Military Minor:

  • in the head of the Khorror. and suspense"
  • under the heading "Film reviews"
  • in the author's column Karnosaur123

experiences and fears he put into it. And the creator said: well, what the hell! And put the novel on the table for five long years. It so happened that this work nevertheless saw the light at 19In 1983, and already in 1989, at the end of the golden era of horror, a fairly accurate film adaptation was released from the girl Mary Lambert, who broke the rental, gained cult status and received rays of love from fans and rays of diarrhea from critics and those who believed that the book " simplified and trivialized. Is it so? Come on!

Recall that the film, like the original novel, tells the story of Dr. Louis Creed, who received a position as an attending physician in the town of Ludlow, Maine, where he moves with his sweet wife Rachel, charming kids Ellie and Gage and a muzzled cat named Winston Churchill or simply Church. On the very first day, little Gage almost runs out onto the road, along which heavy oil trucks drive endlessly, but he is saved by the old man Jud Crandall, who lives next door, who immediately became a friend of the family. Helping the Creeds settle in, he shows them an old cemetery in the forest, where children bury their pets, who, by and large, died on the same road. Farther away, fenced in by a pile of deadwood, is the ancient cemetery of the Mikmaq Indian tribe, which plays a much larger role in the plot than the main animal cemetery.

Luis' first day on the job turns into a nightmare when student Victor Pascoe, hit by a truck, dies in his arms. That same night, Pascow's ghost appears to Luis and leads him to the pet cemetery, where he warns him to contact the forces contained in this land. In the morning, Louis decides that it was just a bad dream.

Soon Church dies under the wheels of a truck. Not wanting to upset his daughter, Louis accepts Jud's offer to bury the cat in an Indian cemetery. Big mistake. The next morning, the cat returns home - but not the same as before. And this is only the beginning of the horrors awaiting the Creed family, as Gage becomes the next victim of the damned oil trucks ...

If we discard the quite natural pickiness that is characteristic of a fan of any book when transferring it to the screen, it becomes obvious that in the first film this transfer was carried out as carefully as possible; if something could not be translated into a film format, the creators found a completely worthy alternative. So, Judd's wife Norma, whose death becomes a harbinger of future tragedies, was replaced by Creed's housekeeper Missy Denbridge, who commits suicide, not wanting to die painfully from cancer; as a result, this line turned out to be more capacious and spectacular, without losing its semantic load (and even strengthening it in some way, since Missy, unlike Norma Crandall, dies young). Or the story of Timmy Butterman, who died in World War II, whose inconsolable father buried him in that same Indian cemetery. In the book, the resurrected Timmy terrified those around him with the knowledge of their most intimate and dirty secrets, until his own father killed him and shot himself; in the film, Timmy has turned into a disgusting zombie that devours children and torments his own face with dirty nails, which was burned by the angry inhabitants of Ludlow, his father dies trying to save him. Simplified? No doubt, however, just a talking dead man would not have looked so impressive on the screen. But besides this, the changes brought a deeper meaning of a different kind to this story - Timmy's father, who protects his monster son to the last, personifies how much love and bitterness of loss can blind a person, which naturally echoes the fate of Louis Creed himself.

And there are actually a lot of such “guns”, elegantly hung in the story through the efforts of screenwriter King and Mary Lambert. For example, an elegant detail is a child portrait of Zelda, Rachel's older sister, who died of spinal meningitis. Rachel cannot get rid of guilt for wishing her sister dead in the end, she is haunted by a terrible image of a emaciated illness of Zelda (everyone who watched this film as a child will surely remember this beauty who visited them in nightmares ...). In the same way, she blames herself for not saving her son - and later he appears to her ... yes, yes, in that very Zeldin suit.

Even the funeral humor, which no-no and slipped in the book, diluting the general tragedy, has not gone away: in the film, the good ghost Victor Paskow is responsible for it, whose role has been significantly expanded. And instead of the author's text, the emotional torment of the characters is emphasized by the richest musical score by Elliot Goldenthal and the virtuoso camera work by Peter Stein. Some complain that Wendigo, the evil spirit of the Indians, who, in fact, was responsible for the resurrection of the dead, disappeared from the film. In fact, he didn’t disappear anywhere: a ghostly light and strange screams behind deadwood, trees falling under the heavy tread of an invisible creature, a face that Luis dreamed of - all this is in the film, except that the creature is not named by name. On the other hand, who said it was a Wendigo in the book? That's what the Indians called it, but the Indians would call it any incomprehensible evil. After all, It also had many names.

The most criticized acting - only the lazy did not write about the "wooden" Dale Midkiff in the role of Louis. It's hard to imagine now how the brilliant "Kick-Ass-The-Dead" Campbell, originally slated for the role, would have played, for whom this could have been a career turning point, however, I find Midkiff's performance restrained, but by no means wooden. However, the real gem of the film was 63-year-old Hollywood veteran Fred Gwynn as Jud and two-year-old Micah Hughes as Gage. And if in the case of Gwynn there is nothing to be surprised at - this seasoned human being has not knitted brooms before, then little Mika literally annealed "nipadezki" in the literal sense, playing both an innocent child and a small fiend with such brilliance that it takes your breath away! It is not surprising that this particular role became the most famous in his career, although later the child prodigy continued to actively act in films.

It is quite obvious that a considerable number of recognized film adaptations of King have much more changes - the most characteristic are Misery, where the key theme of writing for the novel, Christina, is significantly simplified, from which the secondary antagonist Labay completely disappeared, The Green Mile, in which the death of the protagonist's wife was not shown, and this is not to mention The Shining (which, however, is ardently unloved by the majority of King fans, and which critics once smashed even more ruthlessly). However, this does not prevent them from being recognized as classics. Most of the nitpicks about the "Cemetery" script pattern 1989 years is clearly far-fetched and does not take into account the truly titanic work done by King and Lambert. As for the young generation of mother’s logicians, asking questions like “how could a two-year-old child fail his grandfather”, “why the mother was not afraid when she saw a scalpel in the baby’s hand” and “why nothing teaches the hero - this is not madness, but just stupidity”, then it remains only to advise them to read the book, and at the same time to wish that in life they never come across those circumstances, because of which the heroes of the book and the film are not up to common sense. For Pet Cemetery is not a story about zombies and evil spirits, but about death and mind-depriving grief, which is much more terrible. Although the zombies in the film are also great - the make-up artists did their best to make the popcorn gobbled up by the audience by the end of the film insistently asked to come out ...

The fame of the novel and the commercial success of its film adaptation could not but whet the appetite of Hollywood producers, so three years later the film "Pet Sematary 2" was released, but let's not talk about the sad ... about one of the most underrated horror films in stories. Unable to make a serious drama about Ellie Creed growing up - the producers, who had not yet gone to the opposite extreme, felt that the girl's story would not interest the public - Ms. Lambert made an interesting and witty horror film that touches on the topic of loss in the context of traditional teenage problems. Alas, despite the stellar cast, the film collected a modest box office, critics once again uncovered shit-throwers, and for the director it all ended with “Megapiton vs. Gatoroid” and the upcoming documentary about Yulia Tymoshenko as a symbol of the struggle of strong and independent women in a world of triumphant sexism. Let's wish Mary to get out of this hellish abyss of shame and move on to the main thing - the long-awaited (by some) remake of "Pet Sematary".

The idea for a remake was first born back in 2010, in the wake of reworkings of classics, indicating a serious creative crisis in Hollywood. The modern American film industry is extremely timid, does not like experiments and prefers to go on old, proven titles - that is, endless remakes, sequels, prequels, midquels, spin-offs, rethinking, reboots and "re-adaptations" - the politically correct name for all the same remakes. At different times, such masters as Guillermo DelToro and Alexandre Azha, as well as the creator of the new It, Andreas Muschietti, and the talented Spaniard Juan Antonio Baiona, who at one time was even assigned to this project, but then left him, showed the most keen interest in the project. In a word, the new "Cemetery" turned out to be in production hell, and only the success of the new version of "It" revived it, stirring up a dead wave of interest in Stephen King's adaptations. Here, however, as in a well-known anecdote, there was one nuance. The old "It" with the magnificent Tim Curry was an excellent film version of R.L. Stine's horror films, but from Stephen King's colossal plan there were horns and legs, barbarously squeezed into a puritanical television format, and a new version that includes all the sensitive topics raised by the author was as necessary as air. "Cemetery of Pets" 1989 was at least a fairly detailed film adaptation and conveyed the meaning of the book completely. But you can always do better and give the fans of Stephen King the best incarnation of their favorite novel ... Damn, who are we fooling? It's about grandmas, about real grandmas!

That is why everyone with the deltors was sent to the foot erotic, and two dudes squeezed into the director's chair at once - Kevin Kolsh and David Widmyer, who worked well in the field of independent cinema with the curious film "Eyes of a Star", but not too independent to defend producers have their own vision. The screenplay was shared by Matt Greenberg, who scored quite a worthy screenplay for King's 1408, and Jeff Buechler, who can boast of working on the film adaptation of Clive Barker's short story "Midnight Meat Train". Although there is not much to brag about here, since this film is strong with Ryuuhei Kitamura's brutal production, but not Buechler's script as straight as a stick. What did not stop this particular genius from initiating the most important and most shocking change in the script of the upcoming film.

"You can't make a killer baby scary," Buechler said. In translation, this means something like: “We don’t have enough eggs for this.” (Even though the writers and directors had eight balls for four - that's eight more than Mary Lambert, and four times more than Stephen King. Not to mention the fact that King and Lambert did not have current CGI- technologies with which it is cheap to create a zombie child - children's toys.) "Therefore, the killer we will have is the Little Dead Girl - a fucking scary and awesomely original image that was used in just a couple of hundred works. " So now the truck is not hitting Gage, but Ellie Creed. And this is not the spoiler that the title of this article warns about - it was already leaked in the second trailer.

Of course, this ear feint caused fans to seethe with bodily fluids. Some called the wrath of the Wendigo on the heads of the wicked who encroached on the sacred, others enthusiastically accepted the new idea, arguing that the creators were great and it was not interesting to watch the same thing a second time. There have been speculations as to what new abysses of meaning will be revealed by the change in plot (spoiler: none). Personally, I had mixed feelings: on the one hand, as a fan of the book, I experienced sensations in the lower back, comparable to those that a prisoner feels when he drops soap in the shower room of Shawshank prison; on the other hand, I was really glad that the film would not be a tracing-paper from my beloved picture of Lambert. And here is the film. And now King is watching. "- This is something new. They did a good job. God, I saw what was happening on the web when people realized that it was not Gage who ran out into the road, but Ellie, and I thought something like “God, these people ...” This is so crazy. It didn't change anything for me. I thought, “OK, I understand why they did this, because it might be easier to work with a zombie when she's a little girl than when she's almost a baby. This is oh...so great. This is a really good movie. This is a mature, grown-up movie. Not like those films where twenty-seven-year-old "teenagers" are killed at a summer camp. For reference (if anyone is not in the know): King praises all the film adaptations of his work, except for Kubrick's The Shining. Especially now, with age. And most of all, he praises the film adaptations of Mick Garris, which all fans find insipid, like overdried matzah. Why, he even praised The Dark Tower, especially the choice of the actor for the main role. This is no longer the King who wrote "Fury" and slandered the Black Panthers, this is the King who pulled "Fury" from sale and weekly tweets with a kindly quiet word to the villain Trump. Following King, critics scattered in enthusiasm. Judging by their reviews, the audience was expecting “pure horror”, “the scariest movie of 2019of the year ”and in general a masterpiece, with one left doing a cheap craft Lambert with her primitive scarecrows. The famous resource "Rotten Tomatoes" concluded by paraphrasing the slogan of the first film "Sometimes death is better": "Sometimes a remake is better." Let's see what was missing in Mary Lambert's adaptation? Well, for starters, Mary Lambert lacked SCRIMMERS and JUMPSKERES. Everyone knows that horror without SCRIMMERS and JUMPSKERS is not horror at all. You can wipe your ass with books in this genre, since SCRIMMERS and JUMPSKERS are impossible in books. (If anyone doesn’t know, it’s not the same thing. SCRIMMER is when someone attacks the hero with a scream, JUMPSQUERE nightmares the viewer with sharp sounds and movements. People call this boo-effects.) In the film by Kevin Kolsh and Dennis Widmyer there are more than enough skimmers and jumpskairs. Actually, other methods of intimidation are used by them very reluctantly. Constantly someone is attacking someone, trucks are roaring by - the impression is that you are in the company of two oversized pranksters who go out of their way to try to scare you. In addition, Mary Lambert made her movie too light and joyful at the beginning. Well, it’s necessary, the sun is shining, the sky is blue, and the Creed’s house is light and cozy - what nonsense, are we watching a horror movie here, or who? Why the laws of dramaturgy, contrast, dissonance? No, we must immediately show the viewer that right from this moment he should be scared! Here Kolsh and Widmyer show: first, a house burning in the night and a bloody porch, then time rewinds, and we see how the Louis family arrives for a new permanent residence in deep Zh, that is, in a dense forest. Significant twilight reigns all around, the house is dark, as in the ass of not ... an African American (if I were Louis, I would worry that children can get rickets), and the first boo-effect with a truck does not take long. However, the move is much more peaceful than in the old movie (and even more so in the book). Further events unfold rapidly and generally correspond to the book and the first film. At first glance, the changes seem both insignificant and meaningless. For example, Pascow appears to Louis not on the first night after his death, but on the next. The change is not at all critical, but its meaning remains a mystery. Is it just to make it not like the original? It’s just that Luis’s friendship with Jud Crandall has gone somewhere - it’s like the old man is invited to dinner once, but only poor Ellie is really friends with him, and it’s for her sake that Jud decides to bury the cat hit by a car in an old Indian cemetery.

Here we digress a bit from the plot and talk about the actors. There are no questions to Jud, performed by the venerable John Lithgow, except that this is not King's Jud, so masterfully embodied by Fred Gwynn. There was a steel rod in that Jad - this is a native Man, who has gone through fire, water and copper pipes in his long life and is ready to kick ass if necessary (remember how bravely he holds himself up when he finds that a small zombie has already entered his house). New Jad is a weak and rather sloppy old man, moreover, very cowardly and easily becomes a puppet of a cursed place. Jason Clarke, forever remembered by the role of John Connor in the fifth "Terminator", in the role of Louis gives a more or less tolerable game, although against his background, Dale Midkiff, unloved by many, looks like Jack Nicholson. Amy Seimetz - Rachel - is quite good, there is not much to say for Gage, since his role is reduced almost to an extra, but young Jete Laurence can be called a ray of light in this dark (literally) kingdom - her Ellie turned out to be charming and direct. Her death really creeps up to the liver, and you really believe in Luis' desire to return her. As for Paskow, he turned out to be a pale shadow of the original, even though this time he was played by a black man, not a blond Swede ... And a cat, of course, or rather, five cats - five wonderful Maine Coons, who certainly did not hit their faces in the dirt and deserve to be the stars of this movie. By the way, in this version, it is the cat that is guilty of Ellie's death, which can be called a good idea.

Ellie dies, Ellie returns, and then the plot goes in a slightly different direction than the plot of the original book and film. But don't count on a happy ending.

But even these dramatic changes, as it turned out, do not bring anything new to history; at the output we get exactly the same plot, only shot in a darker color filter and with boo-effects. And without the Wendigo, which is here reduced to a picture in a book and a couple of scary sounds in the forest - in the old film adaptation, the role of the evil spirit was much greater. And without Timmy Butterman, from whom there is exactly one line of news on the computer screen, which Louis finds. And without the dog Spot (who for some reason was called Biffer here). And without Louis' dramatic conflict with Rachel's parents. And what did they give us in return? Boo-effects the same as you can repeat! And a couple of Easter eggs like “by the way, about rabies, have you heard about Kujo?” And they showed the kids in masks for a couple of minutes, although they played a very significant role in the trailer and on the posters. At the same time, the two young directors sometimes directly quote the old film, and sometimes I distance myself from it so defiantly that the effect is completely opposite, as in the unforgettable game “don’t think about the polar bear.” So, the scene with the couch and Jud's leg (“Thought it was now with a scalpel on his leg chik-chik? But not! But now chik-chik, oh how we fooled you!”) Only works if you saw the old movie , and in isolation from it completely loses its meaning. Well, Rachel's guilt in front of Zelda is significantly enhanced, the authors did not think the usual "survivor complex" was enough - now Rachel is unwittingly guilty of Zelda's death. Wow, what a subtle approach.

Oh yeah, we also got a soundtrack from Christopher Young, who created the magnificent orchestrations for HellRaisers, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2, Fly 2, Drag Me to Hell. Here, however, he did not particularly bathe, so forget about the rich musical accompaniment of Goldenthal - the monotonous background buzz seeks to convey to the viewer only one message: “SRA-A-A-A-A-AT! Come on, bitches, CRA-A-A-A-A-AT!

But we don't want to shit, dude, we already pooped on the 1989 version . .. And if we didn't poop, then there's nothing to poop from here. Not from completely predictable boo-effects, really? Not from the bloody scenes and make-up, which, despite the fact that thirty years have passed, look pale and unpretentious compared to the "junk of the 80s"? Not from a dark color filter and the diligent work of a smoke machine?

But if you don't shit, then the audience is quite ready to spit. The share of negative reviews on IMDB is growing, the rating is falling (at the moment it is already 6.2 against 6.6 of the original and clearly does not intend to stop there). A similar picture on KinoPoisk, only there it is still sadder for the novelty - 5.928 versus 7.095 for the classics, and this is also clearly not the limit. CinemaScore - the main indicator of audience sentiment - gives the picture C + against the B of the original.

Does this mean that the new Pet Sematary is a bad movie? No. It's a run-of-the-mill streaming product with a couple of hits that you can watch at your leisure as a standalone movie, but it's completely unsuitable as a film adaptation. But this means that the level of American film critics has plummeted. The critics of the late 80s could be ruthless and unfair, but at least they did not try to pass off the glass as a diamond.

But is it worth spending money on a movie ticket to get acquainted with the deplorable state of modern film criticism in the United States? The cat is dead, my friends.


Stephen King's Pet Sematary - Read at DTF

How a terrible incident became the basis for one of the author's most famous novels.

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In Stephen King's extensive bibliography, Pet Sematary occupies a special place. The novel was called the "most terrible" work of the writer almost immediately after its release at 1983, and nothing has changed since then. In this book, the author lifts the curtain on his biggest fears and talks about them in the style of classic Lovecraft.

Let's follow the events that led to the creation of the work, figure out why The Cemetery has been scaring readers over the past 35 years, and at the same time talk about the 1989 film adaptation. On April 4, a new film is just being released - the topic is more relevant than ever.

What is said in the novel

Louis Creed moves into a new home in upstate Maine with his wife Rachel and children Eileen and Gage. Not so long ago, he managed to get a position as a staff doctor at a local university. Upon arrival, they are greeted by a new neighbor, an elderly man named Jude. He immediately warns the family to be careful with the road in front of the house: trucks constantly drive along it.

Some time after they met, Jude takes the family to the local cemetery where local children bury their dead animals. This causes a quarrel between Louis and Rachel: the woman is opposed to the children in any way discussing the topics of death.

At work, Louis is also not going smoothly: student Victor Paskow dies in his arms, who had an accident and came to Louis with a severe head injury. That same night, the deceased young man comes to Louis in a dream and warns him never to go beyond the territory of the pet cemetery.

On Thanksgiving, Church, the Creed family cat, is run over by a truck. Rachel and her children visit her parents, and Luis discovers the pet's corpse. He does not want his daughter Eileen to find out about the death of her pet, but Louis cannot lie that the cat is lost.

Jude, seeing the torment of his new friend and wanting to "pay back" to his neighbor (who helped his wife during a heart attack), takes Luis to the pet cemetery. But they don't stop there, they move on. In the end, the neighbors reach another burial place - the ancient cemetery of the Mikmaq Indian tribe.

On Jude's instructions, Louis buries a dead animal and builds a mound of stones. This ends the ritual, and both men go home. Church returns the next morning. However, the cat is not at all like himself: he is slow, cruel and smells bad. Eileen, after returning home, feels that something is wrong with her pet and refuses to spend the night with him in the same room. Luis begins to regret visiting the graveyard and resurrecting the cat.

Some time later, a tragedy occurs: two-year-old Gage gets under the wheels of a passing car. Beside himself with grief, Louis wants to resurrect his son with the help of the cemetery. Jude tries to talk the neighbor out of the idea, but he decides to go through with it.

Inspirations

The history of the "Cemetery" began in the second half of the 70s. By this time, Stephen King had already published three novels: Carrie, The Shining, and Salem's Lot. The income from book sales allowed the King family not to worry about their future: they could move anywhere and do almost anything they wanted.

Thus, in 1977, the writer and his wife Tabitha decided to settle in England for a year and even enrolled their children in a local school. The reason for the move was King's desire to write a new novel set outside of Maine. He feared that the same location would quickly bore readers. However, the family soon regretted their decision. The inspiration left the author, and the Kings could not get used to the cold English weather, and in the end they decided to return to their native lands.

In 1978, The Stand was released, and Stephen King became truly famous. Fans followed the writer everywhere. But if in Maine people behaved respectfully towards the author's privacy, then in other places it was different: it came to the point that those who wanted to get an autograph pushed books for an autograph through the door cracks in the toilets of restaurants. It is not surprising that the Kings were in no hurry to leave the quiet provincial places of their native state.

Stephen King at 1979 year

In the same period, the writer received an offer to work as a teacher at his native University of Maine for a year. King agreed: he wanted to "return the favor" to his alma mater, thanking the teaching staff of the English Literature Department for everything they did for him during his student years. His duties included giving lectures on "Introduction to Writing" for freshmen, as well as classes in a special course in fantasy literature.

While teaching, the Kings settled in Orrington, twenty miles from the university building. They rented a wonderful house in a tiny and quiet corner of their native provincial state. Everything suited the family, except for one thing - the road in front of the house. Trucks with tanks were constantly rushing along this highway, heading to a nearby chemical plant.

The same house the family lived in in Orrington

Immediately after arriving at their new location, the Kings met Julio Desanctis, the owner of a small shop across from their house. He warned young parents not to lose sight of children and animals. “This is a bad road. Many animals die on it,” he said.

A local cemetery in the forest behind the houses served as a kind of confirmation of these words. There, children buried their beloved pets, which fell under the wheels of passing cars. The place even had its own name, spelled out by a child's hand and misspelled: PET SEMATARY.

According to one of the residents of the town, at first only chicks and squirrels died, and they were buried in a sandbox in the backyard. But over time, the number of victims grew: cats, dogs, birds and even goats died. Therefore, the burial was moved to the nearest hill.

One of the children took the cart, put the body there and took it to the cemetery. They dug graves, buried animals and made tombstones. And then they arranged something like a commemoration. At least thirty children looked after the cemetery.

excerpt from the book "The Heart of Fear"

King remembered an unusual place. He decided that one day he would definitely use the idea of ​​a makeshift cemetery in one of his works. In the meantime, the writer decided to move the chair there: he came to the burial place of pets and spent several hours there to work in peace and quiet.

King's daughter Naomi at the time had a beloved cat named Smaky. One day, while Tabitha and Naomi were shopping, the pet was hit by a truck. The corpse was discovered by the head of the family and quickly buried in the pet cemetery.

Frame from the 1989 film

King had doubts about whether to tell his daughter about the death of a pet. Much more profitable and less tragic for the child, the writer seemed to have the version that Smaki simply ran away. However, Tabitha opposed, and the girl found out the truth. The family organized the funeral, and Naomi made the tombstone herself and wrote on it: "SMAKIE: HE WAS OBEDIBLE."

It seemed to King that his 8-year-old daughter was surprisingly resilient to the loss of an animal, but one evening he heard the sounds of stomping and crying from the garage. It turned out that Naomi found several sheets of bubble wrap, crushed them with her feet and screamed, referring to the Almighty: “That was my cat! May God get his cat. And Smaky was mine."

I believe that such rage is the most correct reaction of a thinking, receptive person to a real, great grief. And I have always admired my daughter for her defiant cry: “May God get his cat!” That's right, baby, that's right.

Stephen King,

from the introduction to Pet Sematary

The bad events didn't end there. Shortly after Smaka's death, the youngest child, Owen, was nearly run over by a passing truck. That day, the King family was visiting neighbors and flying kites. At one point, Owen disappeared from the sight of his parents and rushed to the road. King ran after his son and managed to stop him before the car passed. However, the writer himself, recalling the incident, admitted that he did not have time to reach his son, and Owen stumbled and fell himself. Be that as it may, the child remained alive and well, but his father remembered this moment forever.

King family photo, 70s

King was constantly thinking about what would have happened in a different scenario. These thoughts frightened the writer, and he decided to deal with fear in a proven way: to compose a book. The plot was based on real events, but describing them, King constantly asked himself the question “what if?”. All these dark reflections led to the appearance in the novel of such elements as cats and children who returned from the other world.

Stephen King was writing a book in Julio's shop - there was just a free and quiet room. The work went fast and the days flew by. When the first version of The Cemetery was finished, the writer put it off for a month and a half, as is always the case with new manuscripts. From the very beginning of his career, he believed that it was easier to make edits after a while. However, instead of final editing, the book went “on the table” for several years.

King reread the story, showed it to his wife and one of his friends. All three were truly horrified by the resulting text. But not in terms of style, style, or storytelling. Tabitha, for example, did not accept the book already at the level of the main idea: “When a two-year-old kid dies on the road in a book, it is very, very difficult for me to read and accept this. ” In the preface to the work, King wrote that he was sure that the novel would never be published.

Deciding not to continue with Cemetery, King switched to The Dead Zone (1979), Igniting Eyes (1980), Cujo (1981) and Christina (1982). He had no shortage of ideas, and each published book consolidated the success of the previous one. It was all the more unexpected for him to continue working on the old manuscript. However, the return to the "terrible" text did not happen at all by the will of the author himself.

Art by Dan Mumford

Early in his writing career, King entered into a contract with Doubleday, which published his first five books: Carrie, Salem's Lot, The Shining, the Night Shift collection, and Standoff. If at 19In 1974, the company pleasantly surprised King by agreeing to publish Carrie, but by 1978, relations had heated up.

King was not satisfied with the attitude of the company's leaders towards him, and he was their most profitable author. It got to the point that the heads of Doubleday simply did not recognize King in the corridors of the publishing house when the writer came to meetings with his editor: he had to constantly introduce them to "author number one" again.

In addition, King was hurt by the publisher's demand to reduce The Confrontation by 400 (out of 1200) pages - a printing press could not print a large book. But while editing, the writer was thinking about another problem.

His contract included a "Authors Investment Plan" clause: the publisher agreed to pay King $50,000 a year, but the rest of the profits from the novels were retained by the company. The young author, not expecting his work to be recognized by the world community, of course agreed to such conditions at the beginning of his career.

In this way, Doubleday literally profited from King, whose novels, as well as the rights to their adaptations, brought incredible money. The writer demanded a lump sum payment of $3.5 million from the publisher, but the company offered $500,000 less. After that, King changed publishers and forgot about Doubleday for a while.

However, by 1982 the problem had resurfaced. According to the book A Heart That Lives in Fear, the writer's account had accumulated millions by that time, and Doubleday was paying the standard 50 thousand a year. King asked the publisher to renegotiate the terms of the contract and pay what was due, but this did not happen. He planned to go to court, but the author's literary agent, Kirby MacQualey, suggested another option.

Kirby Macquale

He advised King to give Doubleday exclusive rights to release a new work in exchange for paying off all debts. King, albeit reluctantly, agreed. Since all the works under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman had already been promised to another publisher, the writer had only one option - to return to the Pet Sematary.

After discussions with his wife, work on the book continued: Tabitha admitted that the novel was very good and it would be foolish to hide it from the world. Even despite all the horrors that happen in it.

Cover of the very first edition of book

In 1983, the book was published - and immediately won the love of both readers and literary critics. Sales also did not disappoint: in a year the circulation exceeded two and a half million copies. “Pet Cemetery” went down in history as the most terrible work of King - and this title was given to the work not only for hostile spirits and the living dead.

Limits of what is permitted

Undoubtedly, the slogan "a story that scared even the Master of Horrors" is very suitable for a book advertising campaign or placement on the back cover of an edition. However, this same phrase may mislead the future reader. In Pet Sematary, Stephen King isn't talking about monsters like werewolves and vampires who exterminate people with extreme cruelty. He delves into psychology and tries to establish boundaries, after which a person is able to forget about all his beliefs and common sense.

The story of Louis Creed can be seen on several levels. The very first of these is the desire to get something, despite the consequences. With a similar idea, King refers the reader to the story "The Monkey's Paw" by William Wymark Jacobs.

The protagonist of this story is given the opportunity to make three wishes on the monkey's paw, but the fulfillment of each of them will have unimaginable consequences. Mr. White wants to get £200 to pay off a house loan. The next day, the hero's son leaves to work at a local factory and dies in an accident.

Employer denies liability but agrees to pay £200 penalty to family. Heartbroken parents make a second wish - to bring their son back to life. However, a living dead man comes to their house, who plunges them into horror. The third wish is for the terrible creature to disappear.

Illustration of story

Louis Creed also cannot cope with the desire to return what he lost - his own son. A magical cemetery for him is like a forbidden fruit from the Bible. And neighbor Jad acts as a snake-tempter, which, albeit indirectly, pushes the hero to an unthinkable sin. Louis doesn't care about the consequences. He cannot even imagine how he will explain to his wife and daughter the sudden return of a child from the dead after a formal funeral.

The grieving father has only one thought: to return everything to its place, as in the case of Church. But both resurrections lead to disastrous consequences: both for the family and for Luis personally.

Here begins the second level of history - unwillingness to accept the past. Louis brings Cage back to life because he does not consider his death fair, and his suffering deserved. The death of a child instantly builds a wall between him and Rachel.

However, instead of talking to each other and trying to move on together, each parent prefers to withdraw into themselves and do what they think is right. Louis, accordingly, decides to return everything as it was, resurrecting his son in the cemetery. He remembers that his daughter did not notice Church's "substitution" and hopes that this will happen now. If it doesn't work out, it is always possible, as he thinks, to inject a lethal dose of morphine into the revived son.

If you dig even deeper, it turns out that all fatal events come down to one moment: Louis' refusal to go to Thanksgiving with his wife's parents. It is because of this decision that he finds Church dead, ends up in a graveyard, and then decides to revive Gage. There was once a conflict between him and his father-in-law, and Louis does not want to put up with Rachel's father at all. “He could have gone with Rachel, but Louis chose to send his grandson, granddaughter and daughter to his father-in-law,” King writes, and the decision to continue the feud turns out to be key.

Probably, with this story, the writer is trying to tell his readers that past traumas and sad events always remind of themselves. However, it is in our power to make sure that they can be remembered easily and without regrets. To do this, you need to accept what happened, which for Louis and Rachel is impossible.

Finally, the main theme on which the whole book is built is the fear that a loved one will leave you. In particular, this applies, of course, to parents and children. Stephen King has many phobias, but the main one is the loss of his child. Death is sad, but still the most natural thing in the world. King, like Dr. Louis, understands this. However, the writer does not know how he would behave in a critical situation like the one he describes.

That's why he invented Luis, to present the events he experienced in a darker way and to get to know himself better. He seems to be asking: “And if I were in his place, could I not use the magic cemetery and find the strength to move on, without a person dear to me?”. He addresses the same question to readers, in particular to those who have children. It is incredibly difficult to give an honest answer in this case.

"Pet Cemetery" frightens not with mystical creatures and violence, but with a convincing demonstration of the complete moral degradation of a weak person. And Louis Creed, without a doubt, is such a hero. King carefully describes all the stages that the character goes through in his rapid fall. Worse, he drags his entire family behind him.

The highest point of Louis' personality degradation is the opening of his son's grave. When reading this act is felt as a real crime against humanity and an attack on the natural nature of things. It becomes even more terrible when the reader realizes that all the actions of the hero are dictated by parental love. Louis just understands it in his own way.

In the work, one can see arguments on other topics that contribute to the disclosure of King's main ideas. Among them are the constant allusions to the resurrection of Lazarus in the Gospel of John and the desire of a person to play God, controlling the fate of others. A similar theme is revealed in the famous "Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley.

However, what makes King's novel stand out is that in it the writer convincingly projects a seemingly fantastic theme onto real life. Small details like real-life brands and names help here: Louis, for example, pays for the funeral of his son MasterCard. It seems to be an insignificant detail, but because of it, this episode makes the reader believe that no one is safe: sooner or later death comes to every house, and people usually get used to it surrounded by familiar things.

In the "Cemetery" there were evil spirits, classic for the writer's work. This time the role of the conditional antagonist is played by the demon Wendigo from the folklore of the Indians. According to their legends, a person who was possessed by this evil spirit became a cannibal. King also hints that the ritual cemetery of the Indians "rotted" when colonizers came to their lands and defiled the sacred place with burial places of people who were inhabited by Wendigo.

However, the monster prefers to remain in the background, so the reader may wonder if this supernatural being even exists. Could it be that this demon is just a figment of Luis's imagination, who is living through his worst nightmares? In the end, the line between reality and fiction is always blurred, and King often presents in his novels the concept of mysterious places that exist inside and outside of reality at the same time: in addition to the cemetery and Wendigo, you can remember the Overlook Hotel and the ghosts from The Shining.

The writer also likes to "play" with his characters, turning them into completely different people in the course of the story. In The Graveyard, it's very easy for the reader to start empathizing with Louis Creed - he looks and acts like a normal person. But by the end of the novel, the character turns into the culprit of the death of his family.

We observe how a real person is gradually replaced by a fantastic one, which is hard to imagine. It is impossible to believe in such a metamorphosis, but at the same time it cannot be called an invention of King: no one knows what can happen to a person if he has to go through one really monstrous day.

You can't bypass the parent theme either. As you know, the writer's father left the family - since then, King has not seen him. The author tries to convince himself that he is not like the person who left him in childhood. However, sometimes he is tormented by doubts, and therefore, in his works, King more than once creates father-heroes, whom he endows with ambiguous character traits characteristic of himself.

A striking example is The Shining, whose protagonist starts hunting for his family. In The Graveyard, King imagines Luis willing to do anything for his children, but he eventually succumbs to his selfish and dark side. The protagonist of the book, in turn, views the 70-year-old Jad as his father, whom Luis never had. But here, too, King is true to himself: it is the elderly neighbor who brings his "son" to the ill-fated cemetery, acting at the behest of evil forces.

Screen adaptation of

The financial success of "Cemetery" left no doubt that the story would be filmed. The rights to the film based on the book were sold a year after its publication. Acquired by their famous director George Romero ("Night of the Living Dead"), with whom King collaborated on the set of the anthology "Kaleidoscope of Horrors".

The writer set only two conditions: ten thousand dollars and a percentage of the collection of the picture at the box office. King admitted that he received millions of offers to buy the rights from almost every major Hollywood film studio, but he rejected all of them, as the author did not really like the previous adaptations.

On the set of the movie

Unfortunately, Romero dropped out of the filming process due to being busy with the film "Monkey Tricks" - after that, the production of "Cemetery" stopped. The film's producer, Lindsay Doran, offered to shoot the film to various studios, such as Embassy Pictures, but to no avail.

A little later, she took the position of vice president of film production at Paramount Pictures, but her superiors also did not agree to give the film a green light. They said that after a large number of good and bad adaptations of King's books in the 80s (more than 15 pieces), there would be no demand for a new film.

However, Paramount executives were convinced by the Writers Guild strike in 1988: the studio could have been left without releases in '89, and therefore agreed to allocate money for the project. The filming of "Cemetery" still began.

The director's post was taken by Mary Lambert, who previously shot one little-known film "Siesta" and several clips for the stars of the music scene: Madonna, Janet Jackson and Sting. King was pleased with her candidacy: the writer admired the director's ability to build a visual series suitable for the situation.

King and Lambert

Lambert proved to be a very responsible worker: in addition to her direct duties, she took an active part in the casting. So, she had to personally defend the choice of Fred Guinn for the role of Jad before the leaders of Paramount, because they feared that the public would not accept the actor in a serious movie after the sitcom "The Family of Monsters", in which he played one of the main roles.

Her word became decisive in solving another problem. According to American laws, children of six to nine years old can be on the set for no more than eight hours, and work for four. Therefore, in order to meet the schedule and reduce production costs, the role of Eileen was played by twin sisters.

The studio planned to do the same with Gage's part (children two to six years old could work three hours), but Lambert was impressed by the acting skills of three-year-old Miko Hughes and convinced the directors that the boy could handle the role without delaying the filming process.

In order to protect the child from psychological trauma, many of his scenes (especially at the end of the film) were filmed separately, and blood and other "undesirable" elements were added to the film later. In some scenes, a doll was used instead of him.

Finally, the role of Zelda - disfigured by meningitis and Rachel's deceased sister - was played by actor Andrew Hubatsek. Lambert looked at many candidates for the role and it seemed to her that a man dressed up as a teenage girl would look more intimidating. She was not mistaken: the episodes with Zelda can rightly be considered the scariest in the whole picture.

The director also suggested that the Ramones record a song for the film's soundtrack - they agreed. The choice is not accidental: Stephen King loves their songs very much. In the book "Pet Sematary" you can see references to the work of the group: for example, Louis listens to the track Rockaway Beach in the car, heading to university on his first day at work.

The famous composition of the band called Pet Sematary

Stephen King himself adapted the plot of the book for the film adaptation and insisted that the filming take place on the territory of Maine, which was experiencing financial difficulties in those years. The writer hoped that the film would attract tourists to his native places, and the production itself would create additional jobs for local residents.

Since King lived 20 minutes from the set, he had the opportunity to take an active part in the making of the film: he even played the role of a priest in one of the episodes.

Pet Sematary is an example of a good adaptation of King's novel, a film not only for fans of the book, but for horror fans in general. Mary Lambert followed the style of horror films of the time, like Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead: fast paced, lots of gore, and zombies on the screen.

Good collections only confirmed this: the film earned more than 57 million dollars in America and is still in fifth place among the most profitable film adaptations of Stephen King books. Even Stanley Kubrick's cult "The Shining" was left behind, which collected a little less than 45 million in 1980 year.

Although the critics did not like the picture too much: the Cemetery rating on Rotten Tomatoes is still only 52 percent "fresh".

Probably the problem is that the creators of the picture abandoned all the main features of the original. There is no heartfelt reflection on how people come to terms with death, a convincing transformation of the protagonist who crosses the line separating the act of a loving father from insanity, and the on-screen duet of Dale Midkiff (Louis) and Denise Crosby (Rachel) can hardly be called convincing.

In addition, many of the characters in the book were cut or changed - and by King himself. For example, Judd's wife is not in the film, and her storyline was severely cut and given to the housekeeper of the Creeds.

But in The Cemetery one can also find successful creative solutions: the role of the ghost of Victor Paskow was expanded - in the film he resembles a kind of family guardian angel, although he almost did not appear in the book. The character was remembered by the audience, and fans will recognize the actor Brad Greenquist even many years later.

The main disadvantage of the film adaptation can only be called a lack of emotionality. The film version of "Cemetery" is a mechanical and not too detailed retelling of the main events of the book, and the original source prevents it from becoming a full-fledged slasher.

In 1992, the film had a sequel, also directed by Mary Lambert, but without the participation of King. The plot of the picture is original, but it repeats the themes touched upon in the first part. Critics of the time noted that the second "Cemetery" had good graphics, but there was no interesting story and characters. At the box office, the sequel earned significantly less than the original: only 17 million.

Pet Cemetery 2

Paramount has been wanting to release a new version of Pet Sematary since 2010. In 2015, Guillermo del Toro even wanted to take on the project, but it did not work out. In 2017, the adaptation was directed by Kevin Kolsh and Dennis Widmyer, who worked on the TV adaptation of Scream.

The film will be released on April 4th. The role of Louis in it was played by Jason Clarke ("Rise of the Planet of the Apes: Revolution", "Terminator: Genisys"), the role of Jad - John Lithgow ("Rise of the Planet of the Apes", "Interstellar"), and the role of Rachel - Amy Seimetz ("Atlanta" , "Stranger Things"). Critics have already seen the film and call it one of the best film adaptations of King's novels, which manages to both scare the viewer and make you think.

"Pet Sematary" not only has a special place in Stephen King's bibliography, it has played an important role in the life of the author. The idea of ​​the novel is based on one of the most terrifying events in his biography, which King played out in his imagination in the opposite way, and then shared it with the world.

Cemetery contains a lot of reflections on death, human nature and accepting the inevitable.


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