IT (2017) ** ½

Stephen King’s It was one of my favorite books as a teenager.  I would even read it every year just before October to get me in the mood for Halloween.  I’m also a big fan of the 1990 TV movie starring Tim Curry, so it goes without saying that my expectations for director Andy Muschietti’s new version were lofty.  Sadly, it’s only half a great film. 

The stuff I loved, I loved dearly.  The Losers Club, the team of youngsters who band together to fight the evil clown Pennywise (Bill Skarsgard), were all perfectly cast.  Every pre-teen in the film was amazing, but for me, it was the foulmouthed Richie (Finn Wolfhard) who was the standout.  (Although that’s probably because he reminded me so much of myself.)  Beverly (Sophia Lillis), the lone girl of the club, proved she was the boys’ match in every way and Lillis’ performance shows that she is a star in the making. 

The scenes of the Losers riding their bikes around town, standing up to bullies, and coming together to face the monster were expertly crafted.  Usually, in a horror movie, you can get away with having thin characters and poor craftsmanship if the scares are there.  Unfortunately, the opposite can be said for It.  It’s a superbly put together film filled with great performances, but the one performance the entire picture hinges on is so bad that it nearly sinks the whole enterprise. 

I’m talking of course about Bill Skarsgard’s Pennywise.  I loved the opening scene where Georgie has to find something in the basement and is menaced by what appears to be two glowing eyes that turn out to be nothing more than two lightbulbs sitting on a shelf.  This is unfortunately the scariest part of the whole film and is way spookier than anything Skarsgard can come up with. 

First of all, Skarsgard sounds like the goddamned Leprechaun.  I don’t know who thought this was a good idea, but they should’ve been fired on the spot.  Every time he opened his mouth all I could think of was Warwick Davis.  (Actually, Davis wouldn’t have made a bad Pennywise.)  Secondly, he looks like he can’t wait to devour the kids, which is a huge miscalculation.  He should represent something wholesome to lure the kids in, and then turn evil when it’s too late to turn back.  If you start off with him being evil, there’s nowhere for the character to go.  The only thing you can do is give him even more teeth (which they do, and it doesn’t work at all).

The design of the new Pennywise was another miscalculation.  When I saw the first images of the costume online, I felt that something was off.  As it turns out, my gut instinct was right.  The problem is they tried way too hard to make him look “scary”.  Don’t the filmmakers know that a regular clown is creepy enough to begin with?  It reminds me of that Teen Titans Go episode when Beast Boy and Cyborg try to make clowns “extreme”.

Muschietti goes overboard with all the jump scares, high pitched screams, and sped-up fast motion monsters.  The monsters themselves are pretty crappy.  There’s a headless guy and a pus-spewing leper, and both of them suffer from poor CGI.   

The children’s fears are weak too.  Hands, a painting, a doll that looks like it came from Monster High, and a clogged sink all act as harbingers of doom.  This is It we’re talking about.  It should be shit-your-pants scary.  This feels like some Goosebumps stuff.  If only Muschietti could continually recapture the feeling of that early basement scene, this would’ve been a bull’s eye.  Too bad the rest of the scary set pieces land with a thud. 

There is one area in which the film improves on the original:  The final confrontation.  Instead of having just a cheesy spider, Pennywise transforms himself into various things while fighting the Losers.  While this is an improvement, it’s still nothing to get all worked up about. 

Another stumbling block is that we’re really only being shown half a movie.  This one focuses solely on the kids fighting It while the sequel will focus on them as adults having to confront It again.  Maybe my feelings will change when I see both halves together as one whole, but until then, the film just feels incomplete. 

There’s a part of me that wishes I could edit all the “scary” stuff out of the movie and repackage it as Stand By Me Too.   

In the end, this is an OK Stephen King adaptation.  It is a movie that is in many ways slightly superior to Pet Sematary 2.  It is, however, no Maximum Overdrive.