REVIEW: IT

What really scared you as a kid? Was it giant monsters, the dark, a scary house across the street? For me, it was always the nontraditionally scary things that spooked me. I couldn't watch Mel Stuart's Willy Wonka because of how badly the ubiquitous Oompa Loompas sang in their monotone, dead-faced way.  There was the donkey transformation in Disney's Pinocchio (that also served as a great anti-smoking ad). I wasn't allowed to watch any horror films, but my peers in daycare and elementary school sure were, and the biggest show/event that they talked about being the most terrifying thing you could ever see was "It." Someone brought in a copy of the VHS, with Tim Curry's bulbous egg dome and blood-red Ben Franklin side-do greeting you in the upper right corner. It is creepy. But watching it about ten years later, on Spike TV, I can sum it up with a one-word review: "campy." Curry has a ball with Pennywise, and you're always waiting for him to pop back onscreen. When I caught wind of the remake, way back in 2015, I wondered if the filmmakers were going to be able to walk that fine line of camp and horror like Tommy Lee Wallace's version had.

After seeing It on opening weekend, in a theater full of people, prepared to be spooked, I will say the heart of the 90's miniseries is there and then some, and the camp has attempted to have been strained out. Curry's Pennywise appearance-wise was scary because he looked like a normal clown, with perhaps more exaggerated features. There is no mistaking Bill Skarsgård's interpretation of the Dancing Clown for anything less then evil. It's a more juvenile conception, a big, evil kid in make-up compared to Curry's chain-smoking New Yorker vaudevillian. Curry's role will forever go down in history along with Jack Nicholson's Jack Torrance and Michael Clarke Duncan's John Coffey as the best adaptations of King characters, but Skarsgård certainly gets the job done, and with the help of some updated CGI is sure to land in several more impressionable kids' nightmares.

The clown, I am happy to say, is not the actual focus of the film. It's what gets butts in seats, but the story is pretty determined to try to show a Stand by Me portrait of 80's high school losers. Some more than others get the spotlight (RIP to the character development of Wyatt Olef's Stan, who all we know is Jewish). Finn Wolfhard of "Stranger Things" fame plays motormouth Ritchie, and he created one of my biggest problems of the feature. Of course we all grew up with someone as obnoxious as Ritchie, but I ask where does the function of the character being obnoxious start and the character actually becoming obnoxious begin? I suppose the studios were fearful of having too much emotional depth to an evil clown movie, and right when a stunned silence would've beautifully sufficed, Ritchie's in there with a one-liner about one of the boy's mothers. I could have done with a lot less of him, or at least his mouth.

When the film does decide to wear its heart on its ruffled, circus clown sleeve, it goes all out. I think part of the reason critics have been giving It applause is because it actually cares about its characters. No one is expendable in It, not even the African-American character, which horror movies are so quick to axe first. Everyone gets a turn to have their fears explored, giving us at least a little bit of insight into who they are. Sophia Lillis' Bev was my favorite, and though the reluctancy for this film to really show its teeth (hey, at least we got an R rating, which comes mainly from the potty mouths of the kids) her backstory is the most fleshed out, and the 15-year-old actress's handling of the adult material was admirable. Bev is already an adult in high school, and the loss of innocence the movie portrays is a gut punch.

It never scared me like I wanted it to, or the like the movie wanted to. In a crowd full of people, there was only one huge reaction, and it was a jump scare. An efficient jump scare, but still. The use of CGI opened up Pennywise's abilities to produce some horrifying imagery (he lives up to his name of "the Dancing Clown" and it is a hybrid of campy hilarity and nightmare fuel), but it takes away from the charm of the miniseries had. Tim Curry dissolved into a stop motion clown draining into the sink, and I preferred that over some of the visual effects It had to offer. It was made for a cool $35 million, and with how well it did opening weekdn, I hope the sequel at least doubles that. People want to be scared by an updated version of something that soiled their trousers in their childhood. The chemistry of the cast is seamless, but It needs to not be afraid to go even further. Leave the fear to the audience to conjure up.

Rating: 2.5/4 stars