Brilliant IT

I must admit right now that I had never been to a packed horror movie screening prior to a first night screening of IT.

I was 4 years old in 1975, so I was not among JAWS's opening audiences by a long shot, instead catching it on network television, heavily edited for time, in the mid 1980s.

And I saw a smattering of Nightmare On Elm Street installments over the years on video.

So I was primed to do some screaming.

And I did.

For the uninitiated, IT the Stephen King novel and previous 1990 TV two parter concern a group of outsiders-cum-best-friends who deal with the evil clown Pennywise in 1950s Maine after he murders one  before reuniting as adults in the late 80s when OMG!...he comes back! Both the novel and the TV movie spend a lot of time jumping back and forth between decades, which blunts the effectiveness of the terror in those mediums. But director and co-writer Andy Muschetti has made the very wise decision to keep the action set in 1988 and 1989 with school-age kids in their own world, all brave bravado and scatological humor they are just beginning to understand. But the thing that they do understand is that sweet have-your-backness that the best of childhood friends seem to have. Now for a pictoral comparison:


Tim Curry as Pennywise (1990):





Bill Skarsgard as Pennywise (2017):



Obviously Curry, as creepy as he is, was reined in by network standards and practices. But Skarsgard has no such worries in the film.

He is free to scare the shit out of us.

And he does.

But even though Skarsgard as Pennywise is unforgettable, he is not the only memory you will come away with.

Come on now. Which of us wasn't the new kid at school at least once? The fat kid (or the one who felt fat and ugly inside)? The overprotected kid? The bullied kid? We have all felt that way in our lives at one time or another, whether we want to admit it or not. How about the first time you just plain liked a girl in junior high, and it was cool because she was one of the gang? That's here too. As is the basic idea of facing your childhood fears, whatever your IT happens to be. The final confrontation in the third act runs a little long with the cut-cut--cut editing, but that's a minor quibble. Otherwise IT's a new dramatic horror classic.

MTMG