Monday, October 30, 2023

October Horror Challenge 2023 #95 "Pennywise: The Story of It"

After a terrible movie like the last one i watched, i like to watch somethingi know will be good. That's hard to do when you also want to watch a movie you've never seen before and whittle down your list of movies to watch. It's always hard to know what's going to be a definitely good movie, but documentaries are a pretty safe bet. Most of them are going to be interesting and teach you some things you didn't know about the movie. That's why I decided to finally check this movie out. It's a documentary about the TV adaptation of Stephen King's book "It." this TV miniseries came out in 1990, and it featured Tim Curry as Pennywise the evil clown. He was responsible for a lot of 90s kids being terrified of clowns. I wasn't allowed to watch "It" when it came out (I was still only 9 years old and my mom didn't start letting me read Stephen King's novels until i was 12, so me watching this movie was out of the question, but i remember seeing the ads for this movie when it first aired on TV, and of course i saw the cover of the VHS in movie stores all the time when i was growing up. Tim Curry made a great creepy clown, and so i was interested in seeing this documentary and finding out how they came to cast Tim Curry in that role, as well as whatever else this documentary could tell me about this movie. Send in the clowns!

90% of it is casting the right actor and then getting out of their way. that's what the director had to say about working with Tim Curry, and it rings pretty true to me from what i know about Tim Curry. He's a great actor. Of course, there are other great actorsin the movie too. Harry Anderson, John Ritter, Seth Green (when he was very young). This is one movie that didn't try to have 20 year Olds play pre-teens, they actually hired actors that were 12 or 13, which I appreciated, then and now. I learned a lot about the filming of this movie, including that the filmmakers have mixed feelings about the ending of the movie as much as I do. They worked really hard on those creature effects, but they acknowledge that it does look kind of silly, and it's nice to hear that they have problems with it too. Reading the book, I can see how it would be hard to make this ending work on film without millions of dollars that they just didn't have in their budget for the film. I get it. Maybe it's time for me to revisit the film now that I've seen this documentary, and for it to make me consider watching a five hour long miniseries again after I didn'tlike like it the first time I watched it, that's powerful filmmaking. Give this documentary a watch if you're a fan of the movie, or even if you're a fan of the book who didn't like the movie, see if this movie makes you change your mind.

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