Review: It (2017)

Do you ever remember as a kid that one creepy place in the area that everyone seemed to avoid? Did your friends ever like to tell stories of things that lurked in tunnels or beneath gutters? It’s this sort of creepy paranoia over what could lurk in our everyday neighbourhoods that Stephen King drew on for his novel It, adapted in 1990 to a TV miniseries, and now to a brand new feature film I managed to check out a few days ago.

Stephen King adaptations have, um, varied a fair bit in quality. There’s classics like the Shining, Stand by Me, Shawshank Redemption…and then there’s masterpieces like Maximum Overdrive, a coke-and-AD/DC-fuelled mess which involves rednecks and gas station attendants fighting killer trucks with bazookas. Or The Langoliers, which ended with CGI toothed flying testicles (I’m not even kidding) consuming actors trying to show Shatner how you ham properly. The 1990 It adaptation itself hasn’t aged very well—Tim Curry as the titular entity is great fun, but everything else is bizarre or comical. So how does the 2017 version hold up? Not half bad, to be honest.

The novel itself is a ludicrously thick tome that consumes more trees than are in Saskatchewan with each printing, so the filmmakers wisely opted to focus on one aspect of it—that of a group of kids growing up in the small town of Derry, being stalked by the fear-eating creature that usually takes on the form of a demonic creepy clown called Pennywise. That part of the book was set in the 50s, and here things are moved forward to the late 80s, mostly because that’s when our current 30-40somethings grew up and are all too eager to put their nostalgia on the screen. There’s everything from mullets to The Cult and New Kids on the Block for all you generation X-ers to enjoy, so it gets the authenticity down nicely.

Much like the other big 80s throwback fest to come out lately, Stranger Things (indeed, one of the actors from that crosses over here), the thing that holds this film together is the child cast. There’s not one moment from them that took me out of it, and when Bill Skarsgard as Pennywise creeps up from the tunnels and sewers below to scare the shit out of them, you buy every expression on their faces. There’s maybe one too many in the cast and a couple of them started to blur together for me, but once the climax comes, you’re rooting for these young ‘uns to lay the smackdown on a frill-wearing motherfucker.

And that brings us onto It itself—and as someone who’s not afraid of clowns like everyone else on the world apparently is, I got a kick out of Skarsgard’s performance. Clearly channelling Ledger’s Joker, the best part of his is in the opening, where he goes from a soft-speaking yet creepy child predator to a very literal one, discarding pretences of humanity to let out the monster within. Through the film, Pennywise is constantly cranking up his reality-bending efforts to frighten the hell out of the kids and anyone else he fancies, and Skarsgard isn’t above having some fun in the process.

The horror itself, however, is a bit mixed—I enjoy some good tension in my scary flicks, as perfected by your John Carpenters and Hitchcocks, and while that’s there as well, there’s also a fair bit of jump scare cheapness. Or worse, CGI shapes just spasming at the screen while going ooga booga. A fair bit of the first two acts is rife with that, but it gets better nearer the end—there’s one part where Pennywise gets his influence over one disenfranchised bully that really does the goosebumps rippling.

And speaking of horrifying, a theme in the film is distant or outright abusive parents for our Loser Club heroes, forcing them to band together. To be frank, a couple of these parents come off as creepier than Pennywise himself—such as the dad of Sophia Lillis’s Beverly, a possessive fuck who you swear is some sort of inhuman entity himself. I’m not sure it was deliberate, but kudos to the actor I suppose.

One more minor flaw is the way the tone jumps around—you’ll go from one intense bloody scene to a weird one where the kids are cleaning a bathroom to 80s pop. I guess it’s to let the audience relax after the intensity they just witnessed, but for some, it’s just going to come off as strange.

But overall, yeah, I’ll say I had fun with this one, and I’m going to check out the sequel when it comes out, focusing on the rest of the plot with the now grown-up cast re-confronting It. It’s definitely the performances that bring this one together and give you a group to follow through and root for between the killer clown sequences. So if you want a good coming of age story that just so happens to involve shape-shifting monsters, give this one a watch. And try and get it with a full theatre—the reactions are just as fun.