I have fond memories of reading Stephen King's novel It back in college and there's one scene where the evil clown in the story, Pennywise, grabs a kid's ankle while he's crossing a bridge and my blanket fell on my bed and hit my ankle while I was reading that scene and it caused a mini heart attack for me, so suffice it to say that reading the book was a pretty terrifying experience for me. Unfortenately, when I saw the original movie adaptation of "It," I was disappointed and didn't like much about it except for the great performance by Tim Curry. I was skeptical that this new version of It could succeed where I thoguht the original had failed, but I finally decided to give it a chance this year, so here we go. Let's see what this movie has to offer.
This movie follows seven young kids who are relative outcasts (they don't have many friends outside of each other) who discover an ancient shapeshifting evil that lurks in the sewers of their town of Derry, Maine. This evil comes out once every 27 years to feed on the town's children, and you guessed it, it's time for It to feed this summer. Over the course of the summer, they have to band together and learn to face their fears in order to stop the evil before it kills and eats them too.
The killer evil force in this movie most often takes the form of a bloodthirsty clown called Pennywise, and we get to meet Pennywise in the film's opening sequence. I have to say, they did a good job with that scary scene. Bill Skarsgard does a good job as the murderous clown Pennywise. The young actors do a good job playing the kids as well, and the decision to move the action into 1989 instead of the 70s like the book was a fun one for me because I grew up as a 90s kid, so I appreciated the references to things like New Kids On The Block (NKOTB 4EVER), so that helped make the movie have an added layer of enjoyment for me.
The movie does feel a tad overlong for me. It's 2 hours and 14 minutes or so, which is pretty long for a horror movie, and since the book was over 800 pages long it still manages to leave out a bunch of stuff that happened in the book and still be too long. Not that I'm always upset about some things being left out (there's a long preteen gangbang scene in particular that doesn't need to ever see the light of day). The format is different, too, since it splits the movie into two parts and tells us the kids's story with this movie and the adults's part of the story in the next movie, whereas the book mixed the two stories together and told them to us simultaneously. I think the story loses something being presented the way it is in this version, because we don't get to see how the story the kids lived and the story the adults lived is parallel, but I understand why they split the stories up like this one did for simplicity's sake. There were a few scenes that I was sure this mvie was going to cut that actually surprised me by showing up (I thought seeing a kid knife his dad in the throat was going to be too much for the filmmakers, but they shocked me by keeping that scene in). They also kept the scene where Beverly's dad crawls on top of her and asks if she's still "his girl," though they cut some of what happenes there, thankfully. I was impressed how they kept the line where Pennywise tells Beverly she'll die if she tries to stop him, thoigh they adapted it differently in a cool way. Overall, this movie has some flaws in execution and it does overstay its welcome a little by being too long, but it's still a pretty cool horrifying movie in spite of its flaws.
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