Life is hard when you’re a kid. You’ve got to deal with bullies, puberty, managing your time between the pool and the arcade, and all other sorts of stuff. It’s even worse in Derry, the town built on tragedy and sports an amount of deaths 6 times the national average but is apparently not much of an issue. Parents are more on the abusive side, bullies are more on the psychopathic, and It seems like now children are getting into the habit of disappearing. Case in point: Our protagonist Bill’s little brother Georgie, who went out to play on a rainy day and never came home again. A tragic but all-too-common occurrence in the world, but Bill isn’t one to take the easy way out. Georgie couldn’t have just vanished off the face of the earth, he has to be somewhere. Something had to have happened to him, and Bill can’t rest until he figures out what.
As it turns out, what happened to Georgie is directly connected to what has been going on in Derry since its founding. There is something living in this town, something monstrous and evil, and every 27 years It returns to kill, feeding off of the fear of the townsfolk, particularly young people, like some monstrous psychic parasite. No one seems to realize that It even exists until Bill and his friends, Eddie, Stanley, Ritchie, Ben, Mike and Beverly manage to put the pieces together, but by that point It knows that they know as well. With no one to rely on but themselves, it’s a race against time as Bill and the gang try to conquer their fears as well as the living blight that resides in the sewers. Can the power of friendship overcome Lovecraftian clowns? Maybe if this was an anime.
It ‘17 is but another brick in the wall of films that predominantly feature kids and young adults in lead roles. It’s historically a make-or-break kind of thing, but the Marathon has covered several movies where younger actors have proven to be a boon rather than a detriment, like Monster Squad and City of Lost Children, and It ‘17 is no exception. In fact It might be the best of the bunch, as I think the whole cast nails It. Some characters, Stan and Mike in particular, end up getting shafted in terms of lines, but it’s less an issue with their acting and more with that abridged feeling that I mentioned earlier. Finn Wolfhard as Ritchie is the obvious highlight, Stranger Things lifts at least 50 percent of Its shit from Stephen King after all, but in terms of performances that would negatively impact the movie there’s no weak links.
This is the second adaptation of King’s 1986 novel of course, the first being the famous 1990 miniseries that saw the great Tim Curry playing the role of Pennywise the Dancing Clown. As of this writing I’ve never seen the miniseries so I can’t make any side by side comparisons of the two. 2017’s It obviously the advantage of a couple decades of production advancements, however the 1990 miniseries is a complete entire story, whereas It ‘17 is only what is dubbed ‘Chapter One’. It tries to compensate for that with a two-hour plus runtime, but there’s the distinct impression that you’re seeing the abridged version of a story. As for the dual Pennywise, Bill Skarsgard seems a more an adequate replacement for Curry from what I can tell. More overtly monstrous, which might undercut the creepiness of having a clown crawling around in the sewers, but he gets the job done.
However, that leads into my major issue with Stephen King, and thus with It ‘17: He’s not scary. Perhaps this is only an issue when It comes to adaptations of his work, but I’ve never felt anything beyond mildly chilled with a King story. I like the concepts, and in the hands of the right people the unique essence of King shines through, but they don’t produce the emotional response that I assume the author intended. Say what you will about Clive Barker’s filmography, and I have, but that scene in Hellraiser where the antagonist reformed his body from blood and viscera was an awesome scene as well as disgusting. Not so with King, except for maybe Misery. Misery is pretty creepy.
So then we come to It ‘17, or as I like to call It the pretzel dark ride of horror, because every couple minutes or so you get a new spooky moment thrown at you. Yeah It looks cool, in fact there’s a lot of great little mindbenders in here, but It falls under the common modern horror trap of looking too clean and artificial and thus not truly scary. Not to knock on CGI too much, because I don’t know how much work It would take to do some of this stuff practically, but when It’s people interacting with something that’s clearly not there with them It screws up my suspension of disbelief a bit. Could also be that I’ve seen too many horror movies and have thus become jaded, so folks with a lower spoop tolerance will likely get a lot more out of It.
Whether you end up scared or not, It is a well-made, entertaining movie, and it easily earns the recommendation. Throw this into a ‘modern day horror isn’t shitty after all’ double feature with Get Out this Halloween, or slot it into a much larger Stephen King marathon. Maybe do it dressed as a clown, I dunno. I’m not going to tell you how to spend your free time.
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