It (2017)

It (2017)

IMDB rating 8.1/10

A group of bullied kids band together when a shapeshifting demon, taking the appearance of clown, begins hunting children.

Director: Andy Muschietti

Writers: Chase Palmer (screenplay), Cary Fukunaga (screenplay)

Stars: Bill Skarsgård, Jaeden Lieberher, Finn Wolfhard

R | 2h 15min | Adventure, Drama, Horror

IMDB link Here

Movie rating ★★★★☆  

  Stephen King's evil clown tale is no laughing matter

Tim Robey

Of all the grimly iconic images Stephen King can be credited with thinking up – those slaughtered sisters in The Shining, that pig's-blood deluge in Carrie – there’s one that stands out as so evilly nightmarish, so plain wrong, it’s actively hard to watch. It’s the sight of an innocent young boy, Georgie, being dragged into a storm drain by a child-eating clown – the name’s Pennywise – and never seen, or at least not in living form, again.

Whatever warped part of King’s imagination poor Georgie’s fate in the 1986 novel It sprang from, the line-crossing horror of the idea is hideous enough to have powered two separate adaptations: first the Warners miniseries in 1990, starring an unforgettable Tim Curry, and now a two-part film version.

This lets the new It buy into the current vogue for Eighties teen-flick nostalgia, previously established with the likes of Super 8 and Stranger Things. Expect a Molly Ringwald joke, and much tootling around the fictional Maine village of Derry on bikes, as Georgie’s older brother Bill (Jaeden Lieberher) and six friends try to get the bottom of the nameless evil afflicting their community, which has suffered a spate of unexplained child abductions ever since Georgie got sucked into that sewer.

Andy Muschietti’s film has a lot to whip through in just over two hours, even though this one is only tackling half the book – bear in mind that the whole thing clocked in at a grueling 1,138 pages. Every one of the “Losers’ Club” – that’s Bill and his cohorts – is separately menaced by the thing they most fear, as well as being more straightforwardly persecuted, in classic Stand By Me style, by a group of older school bullies. As a vision of violence and depravity in small-town America, King’s book hardly pulled its punches: there’s a subplot about domestic child abuse, letters being carved into a fat boy’s stomach, racial assaults against the lone black kid (Chosen Jacobs), and so on.

But this is very much a ring-the-changes update, with the ramped-up set pieces and state-of-the-art grisliness to match. Muschietti, who made his debut with the Guillermo-del-Toro-produced wraith chiller Mama (2013), makes the most of every new apparition at his disposal, unleashing them all to do their bit with stadium-rock swagger. Differing from the more 1950s-themed ghouls in either the book or miniseries, they lunge forward at their intended victims with deranged Modigliani faces, or rotting ones, or none at all.

The gut-grabbing intensity of the film’s attack scenes, if anything, causes a problem: it creates a devil of a time building flow. These episodes are so individually frightening that the chirpier interstitial parts, with their stabs at comic relief, don’t gel – it’s as if these terrorised kids keep forgetting the nerve-shredding sights they’ve seen moments before. Tying their adventures together into a potent whole, at this point, is slightly beyond Muschietti’s powers.

Lieberher, though, and Sophia Lillis as the lone girl, invest their parts with a nuance and sympathy that pull us through in the long run. As a rattling ghost-train ride through sewers and derelict houses even David Lynch would think twice before exploring, the film toot-toots its way around at often deafening volume, but settles for doing only partial justice to King’s epic ambitions. Perhaps Muschietti has more of these stored up for the sequel, once an audience has gained faith that the scary stuff – petrifying, when it peaks – is well and truly in hand

 read full review at Telegraph

‘It’ Brings Back Stephen King’s Killer Clown

A.O Scott

Late in the summer of 1989, the marquee of the downtown movie theater in Derry, Me., advertises “A Nightmare on Elm Street 5.” This is an accurate period detail, and also a declaration of kinship, if not outright homage. “It,” Andy Muschietti’s adaptation of the novel by Stephen King, belongs in the same tradition of small-town terror as Wes Craven’s “Nightmare” franchise, though the question of influence has a certain chicken-and-egg quality. Pennywise the clown, the designated predator in “It,” (played by Bill Skarsgard) is, like Freddy Krueger, an avatar of deep childhood fears. And like Freddy, he’s also the literal, lethal manifestation of the evil of the world. As such, he has the potential to spawn endless sequels. He’ll be back.

Or rather, he is back. Mr. Muschietti’s “It,” written by Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga and Gary Dauberman, represents a second trip to this particular well. Mr. King’s novel, published in 1986, was adapted for network television in 1990. The new movie, a skillful blend of nostalgic sentiment and hair-raising effects, with the visual punch of big-screen digital hocus-pocus and the liberties of the R rating, still has the soothing charm of familiarity. The gang of misfit ’80s kids who face down the clown and the deeper horror he represents evoke both the middle school posse of the recent TV series “Stranger Things” (there’s some overlap in the cast), but also the intrepid brotherhood from “Stand by Me,” surely one of the all-time top five Stephen King movie adaptations.

The supernatural nastiness embodied by Pennywise is abetted and to some extent camouflaged by the ordinary human awfulness that also afflicts Derry. In addition to menacing clowns, phantasmatic lepers and spooky paintings come to life, the town is home to an ugly assortment of bullies (the worst one played by Nicholas Hamilton), gossips and abusive parents.

Against these forces — the banal and the diabolical alike — “It” assembles a squad of early and preadolescent ghostbusters as varied as an infantry platoon in a World War II combat picture. The leader is Bill (Jaeden Lieberher), a melancholy, thoughtful boy whose little brother, Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott), has been spirited down a storm sewer by Pennywise. Bill’s comrades — they call themselves the Losers’ Club — include a nerdy chatterbox (Finn Wolfhard) and a germ-phobic mama’s boy (Jack Dylan Grazer), plus a Jewish kid (Wyatt Oleff), a black kid (Chosen Jacobs) and a new kid (Jeremy Ray Taylor). Also a girl, Bev (Sophia Lillis), who becomes part of a sweet, alliterative romantic triangle involving Bill and the new kid, whose name is Ben.

The non-clown essence of It, an H.R. Gigeresque vagina dentata type of deal, is far less scary than Pennywise, with his fluting voice and red balloons, and the other specters that seem to spring from tender young psyches. As creature design has become easier and more elaborate, thanks to digital techniques, it has also become less imaginative. Movie monsters resemble one another more and more, and movies of distinct genres feel increasingly trapped within the expected. The climactic sequence of “It” sacrifices horror-movie creepiness for action-movie bombast, staging a big fight in a cavernous space. We might as well be looking at superheroes.

That we aren’t comes as a relief. The young cast is consistently good company, in particular the Ben-Bill-Bev trio. Ms. Lillis earns the Molly Ringwald reference that mischievously pops up in the script as a wink to those in the audience who still remember the ’80s. What a great time that was to be afraid.

 Read full review at New York times

Slick and Entertaining, It Can't Match the Horror of Stephen King's Classic

Stephanie Zacharek

The best or at least the most memorable movie adaptations of Stephen King novels—like Carrie or The Shining—create a vivid universe unto themselves while channeling King’s fearlessness in exploring the dark side of human nature. King’s novels, with their seemingly infinite layers of detail and meandering, entertaining asides, are difficult to adapt. But whatever you do, locking into King’s tone is essential. For all his willingness to stare down the darkest horrors and put them on the page, he’s also blazingly sympathetic to human insecurities and flaws. He doesn’t just show us a bunch of scary stuff. He challenges us to confront why we find that stuff scary in the first place.

Director Andy Muschietti’s It, adapted from King’s disquieting 1986 epic of the same name, doesn’t cut very deep and isn’t very scary. At its best, it’s a sometimes-entertaining evocation of the way kids think and talk within their little cliques, and of the way they protect one another with fierce loyalty. Rob Reiner’s 1986 Stand By Me is the obvious comparison point. It’s the end of the 1988 school year in the small Maine town of Derry, and a bunch of the nerdier, less-popular kids are looking forward to a summer of being picked on by the town bullies.

Muschietti, who directed the effective 2013 horror thriller Mama, starring Jessica Chastain, does a fine job of sketching each of these kids as individuals, a challenge that even more experienced directors sometimes fail to meet. The problem is that the plot escalates in its ridiculousness, and Muschietti can’t control it. The kids learn that their town is in the grip of an evil force—the It of the title—who emerges every 27 years to feast on the locals, particularly the children. This It generally takes the form of Pennywise (played by Bill Skarsgård), an old-school circus clown with menacing eyes who lives in the town’s sewers and whose presence is sometimes announced by an ominous, free-floating red balloon.

Once the kids realize what It is up to, they want to stop It once and for all. Pennywise is one scary clown, a creature with red greasepaint stripes that trail from his eyes to his leering lips like bloody tears. The first time you see him—in the movie’s genuinely unnerving but also poetic opening, which hews closely to King’s beautifully written first chapter—he’s so scary you wonder if you might be in for a masterpiece. But by the tenth or twelfth—or perhaps twentieth?—time he shows up, the novelty has worn off. Muschietti relies too much on your garden-variety jump scares and now-standard special effects, things like ghoulish limbs twisting every which-way and innocent figures shape-shifting into malevolent ones. As always, the horrors you get a close look at are much less terrifying than those that remain unseen.And that’s the chief problem with adapting any Stephen King novel: Nothing ever looks as scary on-screen as it does in our minds, when we’re sitting alone with a book. With It, seeing isn’t the same as believing.

Read full review at Time

Movie rating ★★★☆☆

Andres Muschietti's movie trades on taboos explored by Stephen King

Jake Wilson

Stephen King's blend of Americana and morbidity is back in favour, as it hasn't been since the 1980s – which given that the 1980s were themselves saturated in nostalgia for the 1950s, suggests we're experiencing the latest cycle of an eternal feedback loop. At any rate, Andres Muschietti's IT, based on portions of King's enormous 1986 horror novel, comes close to capturing the essence of what this author is all about.

King has a pipeline into the collective unconscious – and I use the word "pipeline" advisedly. Like many of his works, IT is set in the outwardly tranquil town of Derry, Maine, which functions like a magnet attracting evil. Here, the horror arises from the sewers beneath the town, home to a being who assumes the mask of a clown named Pennywise (Bill Skarsgard) in order to prey on children.

Besides updating the setting to the 1980s, Muschietti and his writers have raised the age of the heroes by a year or two, along with other concessions to modern scruples. But this is still a story that trades on taboo, and not just the anticipation of children being killed or harmed.

The malign yet fascinating Pennywise represents all the murky aspects of life that these barely adolescent characters are in the process of awakening to, sexuality included. The children swear plentifully and make constant dirty jokes, which is typical King, but not something you see often nowadays in mainstream American cinema.

Muschietti is too prosaic to turn the film into the surrealistic fever dream of the past it could have been. But he makes some wise stylistic judgments, such as not relying on the horror-movie convention of draining colour from the images: the scenes where the characters are racing round the town and its outskirts have the look of an idyllic summer.

He and Skarsgard also have a solid take on Pennywise, who differs from the menacing yet camp figure played by Tim Curry in the novel's 1990 miniseries adaptation. This clown is an uncanny fusion of adult and child – an effect enhanced by a goofy pair of buck teeth, suggesting either a cartoon character or a child who badly needs an orthodontist.

On the other hand, the film is hindered more than it's helped by its constant explicit pop-cultural references, which come off as nudging reminders to older viewers not to view the whole thing too seriously, and are generally too heavy-handed to pass as wit. Lillis looks a lot like a young Amy Adams, and the script finds a clever way to allude to this – but did it have to call out Beverly's resemblance to Molly Ringwald as well?

 Read full review at Sydney Morning Herald

Movie rating ★★★★☆  

Enthusiastic, cine-literate retelling of Stephen King’s horror novel

Mark Kermode

It’s summer, we’re supposed to be having fun. This isn’t fun – it’s scary and disgusting!” It, Stephen King’s 1986 novel about a shape-shifting demon that terrorises the town of Derry, Maine, was memorably filmed for TV in 1990. Boasting a mesmerising star turn by Tim Curry as the malevolent dancing clown, Pennywise, Tommy Lee Wallace’s mini-series became every coulrophobe’s worst nightmare, rivalling Tobe Hooper’s Salem’s Lot for the title of best small-screen King adaptation.

Now, the Argentinean director Andy Muschietti, who directed 2013’s creepy Mama, brings a touch of widescreen gloss to King’s enduring horror-adventure. Drawing heavily on such 80s screen favourites as Poltergeist and The Goonies (both of which were co-written/produced by Steven Spielberg), this latest incarnation will resonate with audiences hooked on the nostalgic weirdness of Netflix’s Stranger Things. The chills may be more funhouse than frightful, but Muschietti’s tangible affection for the misfit schoolkids at the centre of this story draws us into their world, lending engaging weight to their (pre)adolescent trials and tribulations.

Tackling only the early years of King’s chunky source, this “Chapter One” (a sequel is due to follow) relocates the coming-of-age section of the novel from the 50s to the late 80s. Here, poor Georgie Denbrough is dragged into a storm drain by the evil Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård, ably filling Curry’s oversize clown shoes). Riddled with guilt and grief, Georgie’s older brother Bill (Jaeden Lieberher, who shone in Midnight Special), becomes obsessed with finding the lost boy. As the summer vacation of ’89 rolls around, and yet more youngsters disappear, a group of variously bullied “Losers” embark upon a Stand By Me-style quest through the woods and into the sewers, in search of a mythical monster.

Significantly, each of our key characters is haunted by nightmarish apparitions that feed upon their individual fears. With his gangly arms and marionette gait, Skarsgård’s wall-eyed killer clown resembles a baby-faced relative of Freddy Krueger. No surprise, then, that A Nightmare on Elm Street 5 is seen playing at the local cinema. This is a self-reflexively cine-literate world, in which posters for Gremlins and Beetlejuice hang on children’s walls, and the gateway to the monster’s lair resembles Norman Bates’s home from Psycho. In one bravura sequence, the kids use a slide projector to mount their own movie show, which is promptly hijacked by Pennywise in the manner of the spectral Sadako from Ring.

Cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon, who has worked regularly with Park Chan-wook, keeps his cameras gliding elegantly around the action, lending an epic cinematic sweep to the widening horizons of youth. While TV screens burble satirically about having fun with your friends in the sewer, the Losers get involved in outdoor rock fights and bike chases as exuberant as anything from ET. For all its horror trappings, this is still a story in which battles with the supernatural can be abruptly curtailed when your mom turns up unexpectedly. Even the bullies are children at heart. River Phoenix-lookalike Nicholas Hamilton’s Henry may be the knife-wielding scourge of our antiheroes, but a scene in which he is humiliated by his boorish father (“nothing like a little fear to make a paper man crumble”) reminds us that his anger has been passed down through generations, a recurrent King theme.

Flitting between crooked nursery crime chimes and lush orchestral themes, composer Benjamin Wallfisch creates an emotionally resonant score to accompany Muschietti’s blend of scares and sentimentality. The result is an energetic romp with crowd-pleasing appeal that isn’t afraid to bare its gory teeth. While it may not be as frightening as some hardened horror fans desire, the archetypal terrors and fundamental friendships of King’s source are slickly transferred to the screen with a ghoulish enthusiasm that proves hard to resist.

Read full review at The Guardian

Movie rating ★★✬☆☆ 

The scares are few and far between in this Stephen King adaptation

Shalini Langer

In Stephen King’s novel IT, a supernatural figure terrorises children by exploiting their fears, manifesting itself as a clown. In the film adaptation, the horrors lie closer to home, in the form of a sexually predator father, an abusive dad, a sad and overprotective mother, and a Rabbi who may be pushing his son too hard. Plus the grim town is over-run by a gang of school bullies who, during one routine afternoon, carve names into the stomach of a young boy. And yet, we are supposed to believe that clown, which can be shut behind closed doors and which somehow doesn’t kill despite all those teeth, is the scariest thing happening to the seven children.

IT, despite all the horror-film stunts it pulls from then on, and then some, never achieves that same level of dread. That child’s elder brother, Bill (Lieberher), had sent him out that day, and is now riven with guilt and obsessed about finding him down the sewers. He drags with him his friends Richie (Wolfhard), Eddie (Grazer) and Stanley (Oleff). Later, the four are joined by three other ‘misfits’: a girl dubbed a slut, Beverley (Lillis), a plump child with no friends, Ben (Taylor), and a Black kid who is also a victim of the bullies, Mike (Jacobs).

King’s novel spanned a thousand-plus pages, but even given that, Muschietti makes a meek and failed effort at establishing the fears of the seven, which sustain the clown. As a result, the scary thing, or ‘It’, seems to pop up at random, and consistently, and targets only the seven for reasons that remain undefined.

What saves the film from collapsing is the acting by the children, who are effortlessly natural, whether they are just being boys or just being scared kids. As the object of their combined admiration, but with horrors of her own courtesy the sexually abusive father, Lillis is both boldly aware and heartbreakingly fragile. She also has a scene straight out of Stephen King’s Carrie when, as she starts menstruation, she finds herself drenched in blood gushing out of a sink. (The Censors though are intent on hiding something else she picks up apart from tampons in the chemist shop; a grey patch covers the packet.)

As the seven hang out together one summer day, swimming in a creek in plain-white, innocent underwear, listening to a transistor, there is a story in the air. Of children, their friendships, and the real horrors of figuring a way to adulthood amidst benignly negligent or malevolently hurtful parents.

But this film is not it.

 Read full review at Indian Express

A Stephen King Movie That Coasts When It Should Float

Scott Mendelson

The film is almost certain to rock the box office this weekend, and even though (as the headline points out) I wasn’t crazy about the finished product, I’m damn-sure rooting for it. My job is a lot easier when the box office news is good, and even with the overall slower summer season, 2017 has been filled with good news box office stories like the triumphs of John Wick: Chapter 2, Get Out, Split, Wonder Woman and Baby Driver. Let’s hope we can add It to the pile.

It is a monumental disappointment. Andy Muschietti’s picture banks on nostalgia for the original 1990 ABC miniseries and for the idealized childhood experiences represented in films like The Goonies and E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial. What’s most shocking about the picture is that, even with 135 minutes to tell the novel’s “childhood” portion, Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga and Gary Dauberman’s adapted screenplay manages to contain less substance, less context and less primal dread than the comparative portions of the previous “safe for network television” adaptation. I would gladly admit that the first cinematic try at It has shown its age, which is why I’m shocked that this new variation isn’t at least as good.

The picture spends less time on friendship, grief and emotional scars than it does on repetitive sequences of the kids being terrorized by the title villain. This may be a source material issue (I read the book once in college), but the run-ins between Pennywise and the Losers Club become less about toying with the kids and more about offering evidence that the poor clown stinks at closing the deal with the whole “catch and kill the kids” thing. There is symbolism in how the town bullies (and the kids' real world problems) are scarier than the killer clown, but that’s a problem when so much of It concerns the kids being stalked by the clown.

The movie doesn’t work as a horror film because Pennywise become less scary when we see him fail again and again. It’s surprisingly restrained in terms of onscreen violence, arguably following the Pan’s Labyrinth rule hereby it starts with horrific onscreen violence and then holds back for the rest of the film. Yes, there is blood and gore, but (aside from creature gore) it’s not that much worse than what was allowed on network television back in 1990. But it’s fatal flaw is not its lack of carnage but that the picture doesn’t add missing tidbits and nuance from the book. It plays like a highlight reel of the previous version’s big moments.

On its own, It is a mediocre period piece about a handful of thinly-developed kids who get stalked by and eventually confront a supernatural child killer. But our knowledge of the source material, both in terms of its quality and in terms of what the first adaptation left out, leaves this film all the “thinner” for how little context and seasoning it adds. Rather than go all in with the source material and beefing up the characters, the 135-minute movie essentially plays like the cliff notes of the original TV movie (minus the adult sequences) played out at 0.75 speed. Yes, the acting is fine (Sophia Lillis as Beverly and Jaeden Lieberher as Bill are the stand outs), the clown is cool and the moments of interaction offer solid laughs. But It does a little less with far more than its cinematic predecessor.

It is lacking in primal grief, a sense of melancholy, bumps in the night chills and much in the way of cosmic consequence or epic scope. Since the kids aren’t very well sketched (it is sometimes hard to tell Finn Wolfhard’s Ritchie, Jack Dylan Grazer’s Eddie and Wyatt Oleff’s Stanley apart), this first part of It feels like, at best, a variation on (the superior) Kill Bill where we got all the action in the first volume only to get the plot and character in volume two. Maybe the adult material, which was the lowlight of the miniseries and doesn’t generally factor into fans’ warm feelings toward the book, is key to making the kid stuff pop.

The adult portions add a certain mournful foreboding, casting the entire story as a metaphor for falsely idealized childhood and the cruelty of age-related memory loss. Absent that hook and that content, It is essentially a journey through woods already traveled onscreen by the likes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Super 8 and Stranger Things. It is an exercise in nostalgia, no better than Walt Disney’s disappointing Beauty and the Beast from earlier this year. Of course, that film made $1.2 billion worldwide and is the biggest grosser of the year here and abroad. So maybe audiences will be happy with an It that barely floats, often coasts and never soars

Read full review at Forbes