Introduction

I was given this for Christmas, so I’m going to give it a review for Kagemas. If you don’t know by now, I really despise the Stephen King novel IT. That said, I don’t necessarily hate the miniseries, it was imperfect, but it still had some charm since Tim Curry gave an otherwise banal character, a personality. I’m reviewing the remake of IT. Is this a good remake or is it a bad remake?

Plot

You don’t know by now this book is about a group of children, who are haunted by an evil clown. The clown claims to be Bob Gray, but also uses the name Pennywise. One by one the children are tormented until the clown decides to come and eat them. What sounds like a promising premise, is ultimately destroyed by piss-poor writing, and this movie is no exception, because it’s ultimately two hours of the novel’s greatest hits mixed with a little bit of “fresh” material.

Characters

The characters are the whole group of kids, a Motley Crew, if you will, of strange bullied kids. All boys and one chick, but it’s hard to tell each one of them apart, as in the novel, since each one is basically the same character with just a slight flaw and or slight idiosyncrasy that sits there and makes them “different.”Ultimately none of these kids are relatable to you. They are nothing like when I was a kid, this was true of the miniseries as well, but the kids are acting the made up for the lack of relatability and it was believable that the kids in the miniseries were friends. Here it just seems like actors. By the end of this movie, you will hope Pennywise wins,that’s not what happens, as if you didn’t already know and that is a very big let down.

Style/ effects

Nothing really new that set it apart, typical Maine from all the Stephen King movies with the brick architecture, the Mills buildings and everything like that.

FX are dated as all hell, from the headless kid on the stairwell, that look and moved like terrible stop motion. The leper from the book, he looked creepy as hell, but also moved like a shity skeleton from Jason and the Argonauts. I get it, new IT is based in the 80s, but do we really need a stop motion reference to Nightmare on Elm Street part 3? Although I do like the poster that was in the background. The biggest question is how are these kids supposed to be scared of these no-name things including the very horribly produced female like ghost Creature From The Conjuring movie like that? All of them were banal no name ghost, shit ghost. You could have included David S Pumpkins to round off the whole non branded, lame “scary” characters thing. Warner Bros owns the rights to Nightmare on Elm Street and Jason from Friday the 13th? So the fact they didn’t treat this like the novel and updated with the new monsters that would hunt children’s youth back then, is a missed opportunity.

The ballons were CGI, except in close ups. The FX were dated as hell. It seems like WB didn’t care, they just wanted to the cash in on this and hopefully make some money and they ultimately did. There’s nothing wrong with making money, but you know what, if you’re going to sit there and take a franchise like this that for most people, is beloved even if I hated it, you could at least put some fucking care into the goddamn fucking creation of this. Warner Bros could not even make the DVD well. The DVD has two of them, one just for bonus disc the other for the movie. I don’t know if they are trying to be retro or they’re just lazy and incompetent but the case is flimsy as hell. I can push on it and nearly destroy the DVD. Even though FBI warnings are retro as fuck, and Sound quality sucks. There’s just so much wrong with the presentation and production.

Acting
Acting is mostly decent, there’s nothing overly bad here whatsoever. I would like to add in the fact that, regardless of people’s reviews or fandom, Pennywise is not as good as they like to claim. It is not a horrible interpretation, but it is far from Tim Curry, and this is not the Heath Ledger version of Pennywise, there’s definitely room for improvement in the better actor could bring more to this role.

Subtext
Read my book review on this and then you realize at the end, I had nothing more to say on this, other than the fact that it would seem to me, that the subtext is this group of kids are really a bunch of murderers, that invented Pennywise, in order to deal and cope with what they did when they were kids. That subtext, is slightly more visible in this movie that I think they meant to.

Conclusion
I really hope WB learns from the mistakes of this DVD as well as the mistakes of this movie because there’s a second part coming out in 2019 and I am so not looking forward to it. I may not be the biggest fan of this franchise, but I did grow up reading Stephen King and enjoying his books. At the end of the day this was a blatant cash grab, updated to the late 80s and what it gave us was bad effects, all right acting, no real connection to the characters, poor writing and nothing really new to write home about. It is an abysmal failure of a movie, but it made money, so in Hollywood that means it was a stellar success and you are going to sit there capitalize by pumping out Stephen King movies. In 2019 besides IT part 2, we’re getting a remake of Pet Sematary, another mediocre movie based on a Stephen King novel. I personally would avoid this and any of the remakes of his flicks, as none of the originals were even that good. The books are better. If you’re going to sit there and waste time just go read the book. I give this movie

2 out of 5 stars.

Postscript:
For a company that said it wasn’t going to do the child gang fuck because it was “going to far.” They sure had no problem putting a teen in her skives and letting boys gawk at her, which seems just as bad. Not to mention, Hollywood is ass kissing the me too movement but there was two non consensual kisses in this. I guess that is why I review them and they make them, because they are clearly people who have their shit together./sarcasm