IT (2017)
Directed by Andy Muschietti
Remakes. Boy do I dislike remakes. For every decent one (see My Bloody Valentine 3D) you get at least 5 terrible ones (see A Nightmare on Elm Street and Black Xmas). It seems that Hollywood is running out of original ideas, especially when it comes to horror. Every horror movie of note has had a remake now. With millions of people being scared of Clowns, for some reason, it was only logical that they remake Stephen King’s It. The original was a made for TV mini series in 1990. Basically, this is the first big screen adaptation of the King novel. People raved and raved when this came out, saying it was better than the original, and telling me I should see it. Everybody was telling me this. EVERYBODY! Was it as good as everyone said? Well I was able to watch it Sunday morning…
First off, I want to talk about this movie’s hype. It was relentless! Turn on youtube to watch a video about wrestling, boom It trailer! Go to work and coworkers are asking me if I saw the trailer. Watch a football game and during the commercials, boom trailer. Take a shit at a McDonalds, and two guys are in the bathroom talking about the fuckin movie! My god that last one actually happened. I couldn’t escape this movie. People that know me, know that I love horror movies. So everyone was telling me to watch this thing. So right off the bat I hated it. I refused to go see it in the theater. I got so tired of seeing that damn clown! The reviews started flying in, saying how great it was, its better than the original! I told myself I wasn’t going to watch it until it came out on video. I stuck to that promise, I rented it off Amazon Prime. Sunday, I sat down with my wife and watch this. You know what? It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t amazing either though!
While we found it entertaining, hell my wife actually put her phone down and actively watched this movie, which is a shock. I felt like it was too long. Yeah, I know the book is like a million pages, but for a multi part movie, it should have been 90mins instead of 2 hours and 15 minutes. I found myself getting distracted a lot and checking my watch. The pacing of the movie was alright for how long it was, I just grew immune to Pennywise. Maybe because he was everywhere before this movie came out. Hell, my twitter and facebook were littered with Pennywise memes every damn day!
What I liked about the movie. The acting was solid, I will say that. All the kids put in great performances and that can be rare for a horror movie. Bill Skarsgard did a good job as Pennywise, he was creepy and crazy, although that wore off to me as the movie went on, due to over exposure. The feel of the movie, to me was less of a horror film and more of an 80s coming of age film like Stand By Me or The Goonies. You have a group of misfits that are all friends, teaming together to fight off an evil spirit. I enjoyed the relationships the kids have we each other, and you actually got the feeling that they were all probably friends during the making of the movie. The bullies were also pretty good actors and I really ended up hating all of them, they were such dicks. The opening scenes with Georgie and Pennywise were disturbing, you could feel a knot tightening in your stomach with each exchange. When Pennywise finally took Georgie you felt the pain of his brother Bill.
What I didn’t like about the movie. Like I mentioned before, I felt like it was too long. Some scenes were way too dark and you couldn’t see what was going on. It is something that happens in a lot of horror movies (Humongous…my lord watch Humongous!). When dark scenes linger too long, it loses my attention because I can’t make out what is going on and it pisses me off. Pennywise was overexposed, it seemed like you saw him every five minutes. He started off creepy then he kind of became annoying to me, “oh there’s that damn clown again.” There wasn’t too much that I didn’t like with this movie really.
What did I think of It? I finally watched it so stop telling me to! It was alright, it was entertaining but didn’t live up to the hype for me. How could it though? It was greatly over-hyped by everyone I met, everyone I know, and every social media platform known to man. Hell, myspace was probably even talking about it, but no one would know seeing that no one has been on there in 10 years. Funny thing, after the movie ended I went “hmmm”, looked at my wife and said “if you could grade this, on a scale of A to F, what would you give it?” She said “well, maybe a C+?” Which is exactly what my grade was! It was entertaining, but not great. In the end I felt it was too long and Pennywise had too much face time to make him scary. If I’m grading it vs other remakes, then it would be one of the best, but with how shitty remakes usually are, it doesn’t have much competition. I’ll stick with my C+ rating.
