IT (2017)

Have clowns ever been funny? Genuinely funny? Let’s be real, they’ve always been creepy.

School has just ended as Bill, Richie, Eddie and Stan look forward to the summer of ‘89. Eight months prior, Bill’s little brother Georgie went missing on a stormy afternoon. Bill still hasn’t gotten over Georgie’s disappearance, believing he may still be alive while everyone else assumes the worst. Meanwhile we are also introduced to Beverly who is constantly bullied for supposedly sleeping with several boys at the school, awkward new kid Ben who takes an interest in the town of Derry’s bizarre history, and home schooled Mike who is being prepped to take over the family slaughterhouse business despite not wanting to kill animals. All seven of them are to some extent victims of a group of sadistic bullies. Not long into summer, the kids begin having strange and frightening visions:

–On his trip to deliver some meat, Mike sees several charred hands trying to break through the door to the butcher’s. The door finally opens up for Mike to hear the sound of sheep and sees a clown swinging back and forth in chains amongst several dead animals.

–As Ben researches the tragedies of Derry’s past, a red balloon that only he can see floats down to the basement. He follows the balloon until a headless body chases him away from the library.

–While Stan practices for his bar mitzvah, an eerie painting of a woman with a contorted face comes to life chasing him out of the building.

–On his way back home from hanging out with Bill and the others, Eddie comes across a leper who chases him over to an abandoned house where he meets a clown carrying a dozen red balloons. The terrified Eddie bolts home as fast as he possibly can.

–Beverly hears several voices of children coming from the drain pipe of her bathroom sink. As she leans over the sink, clogged hair flies out from the pipe, restraining her, while blood gushes out covering the bathroom in red. Beverly’s abusive father walks in asking her what’s going on. The bathroom is drenched in blood and yet her father doesn’t notice anything different. Only Beverly can see the blood.

–At his parents house Bill sees what looks like his little brother darting from the kitchen to the basement. He chases after the figure where he finds the basement flooded and Georgie standing in the far corner. Georgie invites Bill to join him, saying “you’ll float too” over and over again. The clown then rises out of the water and chases Bill back upstairs before disappearing again.

Bill and his friends along with Beverly, who went to elementary school with him, come into contact with Ben and Mike through the bullies tormenting all of them. They all band together when they gang up on the bullies by pelting them with rocks. Afterwards everyone come clean about the traumatizing visions they’ve been experiencing. Oddly enough, Richie is the only on who hasn’t seen anything yet even though his greatest fear is clowns. Eddie takes the group, who’ve dubbed themselves The Losers’ Club, to the house where he saw the leper and the clown. Thanks to Ben’s knowledge on the history of Derry, they know this house is the site of a well leading to a sewer system connecting every location a child has gone missing. The Losers’ Club must work together to defeat whatever It is, before It can divide them and pick them all off one by one.

 

What I Liked

The Opening Scene

Bill makes a paper boat for Georgie and names it the S.S. Georgie. The excited little boy dons his yellow raincoat and dashes outside to sail the S.S. Georgie off on it’s maiden voyage. He follows his boat down a stream along the edge of the road until the boat is sucked away into a sewer drain. The devastated Georgie ducks down to find the boat. Suddenly a clown clutching the S.S. Geogie appears. The clown asks the boy if he would like his boat back along with a balloon. Georgie says he’s not supposed to take anything from strangers, to which the clown introduces himself as Pennywise The Dancing Clown (“Now we aren’t strangers. Are we?”). Pennywise further entices Georgie by revealing there’s a circus down in the sewers with lots of candy and popcorn (God this clown is creepy). Georgie needs to be going but Pennywise offers the boat back. Georgie reaches into the sewer before Pennywise’s mouth opens unnaturally wide to reveal shark-like teeth as he chomps the boy’s right arm off. Georgie begins screaming, bleeding out into the stream, as Pennywise grabs his ankle pulling the traumatized boy back into the depths of the sewer.

This scene did a great job of getting under my skin. The moody sky, the pouring rain, the raincoat-clad boy playing, the freaky grinning clown hiding in a sewer. All of these elements contribute to the perfect opening for this film. And probably one of the best opening scenes to a horror movie I’ve seen in quite some time. Many films like this one cut away before death, or at least severe injury, falls upon a child. But IT doesn’t spare it’s audience the brutal nature of Georgie’s murder. We are shown a seven-year-old child screaming bloody murder while he begins bleeding to death in the road. It’s brutal. It’s shocking. It’s disgusting. At my showing there was a chorus of gasps the moment Pennywise bit Georgie’s arm off, followed by dead silence while we all watched him trying to crawl away. This scene truly is horrifying and is in my opinion the scariest part of the whole film. Not to say the rest is dull because there are plenty of other solidly creepy moments throughout.

Pennywise

What an awesome horror movie villain! Pennywise The Dancing Clown’s backstory is mostly a mystery. We do know he is a shape shifting clown who has been terrorizing the town of Derry every 27 years since the town’s founding. Actually, “Pennywise” probably isn’t even It’s true identity. Bill Skarsgard gives a terrific performance as the deranged clown. While there is obviously some CGI elements to his character, Skarsgard adds many subtle touches to make his character even creepier. Take the Georgie scene for instance. Pennywise initially charms the boy by making him laugh. But then his tone shifts, he becomes more quiet, staring hungrily at the meal before him. When Georgie says he has to leave, Pennywise’s expression slips briefly revealing a desperation to appease his appetite. These subtle character ticks Skarsgard gives Pennywise makes him into a more fully realized character. Without having to spoon feed everything about him to the audience either which is very impressive. As I write this review I’m now convinced Pennywise deserves a spot alongside some of the best villains in horror cinema history.

IT is very liberal with it’s use of jump scares. Normally I would argue jump scares are lazy attempts to scare the audience when the filmmakers aren’t confident the story alone isn’t scary enough. In IT’s case the jump scares actually make sense within the story. Pennywise feeds off of children’s fear. The more scared the child, the tastier they are. Pennywise takes advantage of all the kids’ deepest fears, as well as some basic fears (like clowns), to scare them even more. With this in mind, aren’t jump scares a pretty effective way to freak the living daylights out of an already thoroughly freaked out child? The projection room scene is one of the most effective jump scares I’ve experienced in a horror film. Sure it goes a wee bit too far when the giant Pennywise continues crawling out of the screen, but that initial popping out of the screen while the lights blink on and off definitely succeeds at scaring me. To any future slasher/horror movie directors: use Pennywise as a prime example of how to make an effectively creepy antagonist.

The Kids

Kudos to the casting director for this film. All of the child actors bring their A-game. There is no weak link in the chain. The performances are all very natural and it feels like these kids truly are friends. The stand-outs are Richie and Beverly. Some audiences may be put off by Ritchie’s potty mouth (he practically drops the F-bomb every couple of words) but I think many of us knew kids like him in middle and high school. Richie is the only one who never sees scary visions while alone, which is interesting because he’s the one afraid of clowns. It’s the projection room where he finally sees something: a giant clown popping out of the projection. Damn, I just can’t get over that scene. Richie is also the funniest of the group and his cursing is somehow more endearing than it is vulgar.

Beverly gets the most screen time (possibly aside from Bill) dedicated to her greatest fear. That fear being her abusive father. The implication is that he is sexually abusing her but that is never overtly stated. Her character arc is very satisfying as she goes from being terrified and submissive towards her father to physically fighting back to the point she kills him in self-defense. That is why she isn’t afraid of Pennywise anymore after she’s kidnapped. She has already conquered her greatest fear, so what could Pennywise possibly use against her now? Beverly is a strong character who in many ways overtakes Bill as the main protagonist. She is relegated to damsel in distress and does need to be snapped out of the trance by being kissed (admittedly it is kinda eye-role worthy). But on the flip-side she is also shown to have arguably the most growth out of all the main characters and is the first to stand up against Pennywise by telling him she isn’t afraid anymore.

While those two are my favorites, the rest are great as well. Ben is very sympathetic as the awkward new kid pining for Beverly, Bill’s journey towards accepting the fact Georgie’s dead is heartbreaking while at the same time allows for him to finally have some closure, Eddie is hilarious as the kind-hearted germophobe who is too sheltered by his helicopter mother, and Stan is understandable with his reaction being none of it is real. Heck, that probably would’ve been my response. The only character to get short-changed with screen time is Mike. Mike is very likable and he gets his own mini-arc with his fear of burnt bodies and killing animals, however I would’ve liked to see more of his story and his relationship to his grandfather. But with so many characters I get why the filmmakers couldn’t focus on all of them.

IT: Chapter Two

Normally having a sequel to a good horror movie is a bad idea. A very bad idea. But y’know what? Something was different this time. At the end the screen cuts to black, the ominous ‘IT’ title card pops up, then ‘CHAPTER ONE’ overlaps the title. My initial reaction: “Oh $#it!” Not in a negative way though. More like “Oh $#it! Another one?! I wanna see that ASAP!” I’ve never read the book and as far as I know Stephen King never wrote a sequel, so it’ll be interesting to see where the filmmakers go with Pennywise in the next one. I’m looking forward to IT: Chapter Two more than almost any other confirmed horror sequel/prequel/reboot I can think of currently in the works. Sadly we’ll probably have to wait a couple of years for it. Frankly I’m surprised to write this, but IT is a really good horror film that has the potential for a really good sequel.

What I Didn’t Like

Third Act Scares Don’t Live Up To The Rest Of IT

After the Losers’ Club fails to defeat Pennywise in their first encounter, the team begins fighting amongst each other and they go their separate ways. Pennywise takes advantage of this by kidnapping Beverly to draw the others’ attention. He isn’t able to kill her however because she isn’t afraid of him anymore. Once all the main characters have gathered in Pennywise’s lair, they snap Beverly out of a trance the clown put her under. The seven of them together gang up on Pennywise as he shifts into various forms. Nothing works however, causing the murderous clown to retreat down another well. Bill sees Pennywise split apart into pieces as he falls down into the darkness of the well.

This wasn’t a bad ending but it’s kind of a let-down in terms of the scare factor. Georgie’s murder, the projector scene, the haunted house, and the flooded basement scene all wonderfully dialed up the creep factor to the point It was really getting under my skin. The ending in the sewers? Not so much. Also this ending does make sense in terms of the character arcs. The film is organized in a way that shows the evolution of the main characters from being petrified by their individual fears, to overcoming those fears, to standing together against Pennywise. Hurray for plot and character progression! So like I said before, not a bad ending, but it does sacrifice effective scares. I guess I was just hoping to be more frightened at the ending like I was earlier in the film.

 

2017 has been a good year for horror fans! After Get Out, Alien: Covenant, and The Belko Experiment, along with many others, IT continues the trend of great horror movies coming out this year. If you want to have a great time at the theater and get thoroughly creeped out, IT is the must-see movie this week.