Despite a scene-stealing turn from Bill Hader, It Chapter Two sinks instead of floating
Film Reviews moviereview
Andy Muschietti’s 2017 film version of one half of Stephen King’s sprawling 1,100-page novel It isn’t perfect. But it does succeed at the most basic task of adapting a terrifying book: staging horror scenes that are genuinely creepy. Its sequel, It Chapter Two, seems as though it’s taking a similar approach, opening with a sinister carnival populated by King’s signature evil bullies—along, of course, with the clown that traumatized a generation, both in fiction and in real life. Then, suddenly, you’re three-quarters of the way through this 170-minute film, and you realize that, although the horror imagery has only accelerated, your heartbeat has been slow and your fists unclenched for a while now. The film isn’t an abject failure by any means; it has some funny jokes, a couple of really good performances, impressive creature and set design, and pleasing cinematography. But when it comes down to it, It Chapter Two just isn’t all that scary.
The biggest question going in to Chapter Two was who would play the grown-up versions of the Losers Club, the preteen outcasts who booted Pennywise the Clown (Bill Skarsgård) into the screaming cosmic void at the end of the first movie. Happily, this aspect of the film is excellent, with casting that’s so spot on that Muschietti shows it off in a shot morphing together the faces of one young actor and his adult counterpart halfway through the film. Summoned by a phone call from Mike Hanlon (Isaiah Mustafa), the one member of the clique who never moved away from their hometown, the adult Losers—Bill Denbrough (James McAvoy), Beverly Marsh (Jessica Chastain), Richie Tozier (Bill Hader), Ben Hanscom (Jay Ryan), Eddie Kaspbrak (James Ransone), and Stanley Uris (Andy Bean), each of whom has changed dramatically in some ways, and not at all in others—feel strangely compelled to return to Derry, Maine, although they can barely remember anything that happened while they lived there.
Once reassembled, they slowly begin to remember the summer of 1989, and everything that they went through in the sewers underneath Derry. As Mike explains to them over a Chinese-food reunion dinner, their efforts that year weren’t entirely successful, and the 27-year cycle that’s seen centuries’ worth of children murdered by the immortal Pennywise has started up again. Would they be willing, Mike asks them, to try to kill It again, this time for good?
It Chapter Two is built around this return, in an episodic, repeating structure that splits up the Losers and sends each of them into their personal nightmares twice over—once to gather an artifact that will help them perform a Native American banishing ceremony known as the “Ritual of Chüd,” and once again when the ritual spins out of control. Some of these personal journeys are better developed than others; the most psychologically compelling belongs to the unsinkable Beverly Marsh. Bev’s return to her childhood apartment, where she’s confronted with memories of her abusive father in the guise of a demon disguised as a kindly old woman, is the most nightmarishly evocative sequence in the film, matched by an intense scene later on where Chastain tries to break out of a barricaded bathroom stall that’s rapidly filling up with blood. Compared to these, most of the film’s scare scenes, several of which are direct callbacks to more effective scenes in the previous It, seem, well, bloodless.
But where Bev’s storyline is the most compelling, Hader’s performance as Richie “Trashmouth” Tozier—who, in a contemporary update, has grown up to become a stand-up comic rather than a radio DJ—is by far the most magnetic. Even more so than Finn Wolfhard did as a young Richie in Chapter One, Hader picks up the whole movie, puts it in his pocket, and walks away with it. Although it’s not an overtly flashy performance, Hader’s charisma in the role is difficult to overstate, and the eye wanders naturally towards him every time he’s on screen. Hader is also the only member of the cast for whom the film’s quip-laden dialogue makes sense. (If you don’t get the meta joke about Bill’s inability to write a decent ending to one of his books the first time, the next half-dozen uses of the bit should suffice.) It’s as if the script, once again from screenwriter Gary Dauberman, was given a punch-up by Trashmouth himself—which is great for Hader, but terrible for any sort of sustained suspense. The deployment of these comedic asides is often spectacularly ill-timed, particularly in a callback scene where Eddie confronts “the leper” that’s been haunting him since childhood. The scene is grimy and unnerving—that is, until Muschietti drops in a brief blast of the cheesy AM Gold hit “Angel Of The Morning” right when the terror is peaking, popping the balloon of dread instantly.
Speaking of, Richie also gets one of the better visions of Pennywise amongst the adult Losers, a vision of the evil clown floating down from an animated Paul Bunyan statue with a bouquet of red balloons that will be familiar to readers of King’s novel. (What won’t be familiar is an additional subplot that implies, without making explicit, new information about Richie’s sexuality.) The film is so spread out, however, that Pennywise isn’t as palpable of a presence here as in Chapter One, although Skarsgård commits just as completely to the role, his eyes wild and his chin dribbling with psychotic drool. In fact, the best Pennywise scene in It Chapter Two is one that was invented for the film, where the clown lures a lonely little girl under the bleachers at a high school football game, then chows down on her head with its layers of deep-sea creature jaws.
King’s novel is, admittedly, also spread out and repetitive in its structure, so in this regard It Chapter Two is technically more faithful to the original than its predecessor. But in terms of adaptation, Chapter Two cuts out much of the connecting tissue that makes King’s Losers a single living, breathing organism, making them less bronchi in a lung and more isolated cells floating down the same bloodstream. To wit: Although he’s been restored to his rightful place as the Losers Club’s semi-official historian, Mike is nevertheless pushed to the margins of the story by the removal of a key historical interlude in King’s novel. This reframing, from the intergenerational trauma of the fire at the Black Spot to Mike’s personal guilt at being unable to save his drug-addicted parents, is part of a larger shift away from the theme of ancient evil shaping history and towards a theme of childhood trauma and how it carries into adulthood.
The pursuit of the Losers by their childhood bully Henry Bowers (Teach Grant), here freshly escaped from the mental institution where he’s been locked up for the past 27 years, is similarly underplayed, and the subplot that sees Beverly’s abusive husband chasing her to Derry is excised completely. The result is the defanging of one of the most interesting elements of King’s book: the massive, inescapable scope of Pennywise’s evil, replaced by a more rote internal, individualistic struggle. Perhaps predictably, then, those hoping to see the cosmic strangeness of King’s novel translated to the screen are going to be disappointed, as those elements are corralled into into a handful of fine, but not especially memorable, CGI sequences. And while we won’t delve into the details of the ending here, suffice to say the apocalyptic scale of Derry’s fate has been scaled back significantly, replaced with a sentimental farewell to the lifelong friends and their shared ordeal.
This is all presented in a beautiful package: The film’s color palette is rich, and Muschietti skillfully blends past and present with sweeping camera movements that take us from flashbacks to the present day without a single cut. The art direction and production design are both top notch and full of tactile detail, and the entomologically inspired creature design nods both to King’s novel and such imaginative influences as Jan Švankmajer, the Brothers Quay, and Rob Bottin’s special effects work on John Carpenter’s The Thing. What a shame, then to build this beautiful stage, populate it with talented actors and high-level craftspeople, and then drop them all through the trap door of plodding humor and scattershot plotting. Spraying a balloon with buckshot is one way to take it down, we suppose.
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So the main issue is it’s too funny?
Sounds like it tries to be too funny
It pretty much goes full-tilt horror-comedy.
Bite my bag. Met some lady at Bingo. Turned into a pretty nice fuckeree.
Ayuh.
triggered
Clowns are funny.
That’s disappointing. I didn’t think Chapter One was that scary either, but my hopes were that because it was so focused on children that they would really go for broke in the sequel and could terrorize adults.Glad Hader is good though. He’s pretty much earned a lifetime pass for Barry.
Yup. I never much liked Hader – good in voice roles, but I have no respect for essentially anyone of that SNL era.Then Barry happened. Now Hader can coast on my goodwill from that forever.
If you ever have a chance you might want to try Skeleton Twins. It’s a dark movie, but he and Kristen Wiig are fantastic, and there are good supporting turns from Luke Wilson and Joanna Cassidy. (I don’t mean that to sound like shilling, sorry).
And the Skeleton Twins … ?ARE PART OF IT!Any questions?
Yes, several!
Terrible ending tho
I would also check out the first two seasons of Documentary Now, if you’re looking for a better quality of work from Hader than his SNL years. He’s particularly good in Parker Gail’s Location is Everything—making fun of the unreliable aspect of first-person confessional monologues—but he’s also great as the star of Mr Runner-Up and does a solid job holding up his corner of the excellent Juan Loves Chicken and Rice. He plays a range of parts across the show, and he embodies them all as individual characters in a way that I really appreciated watching through it.(Season three he’s not in the show because of Barry, and it’s fine, they seem to have handled off some of the heavy lifting behind the scenes to Mulaney and Meyer, who wrote in the first two seasons, and… I mean, it’s a lot of weirdly faithful parodies of different influential documentaries, I’m a fan even when I don’t know the primary source material.)
He’s also quite good on the first two seasons of Documentary Now!. That’s where I first saw him. I haven’t watch SNL in a long time.
The second season of Documentary Now was basically the Bill Hader Show, which I’m 100% fine with because he knocked it out of the fucking park. “Location is Everything” and the two-part finale are just hilarious, and his delivery (and his perfect vocal control) are most of it.
I hated “Stefon”, which was his most famous SNL character, (esp. because he kept breaking every time I watched), so it took a while for me to come around on him, but he was great in Trainwreck, Documentary Now, and of course Barry. Definitely one of the most talented actors working currently.
Documentary Now! was my turning point. Hader and Fred Armisen are just too good in that.ETA: Apologies for repeating others’ sentiments.
Vanessa Bayer, Bill Hader, Kristin Wigg, Jason Sudekis, Taran Killam?That’s a lot of great players to have no respect for…
Sudekis is ok when not mugging horrifically, but the only movie I’ve seen him in is Horrible Bosses. His film output looks entirely mediocre.Kristin Wigg just does the same exact character Will Ferrell does – an over the top obnoxious loser with no self awareness. I hate it from Ferrell, and hate it from her. Can’t say I’ve seen the others in anything.
I never much liked Hader – good in voice roles, but I have no respect for essentially anyone of that SNL era.same…SNL smdh
Aw, I thought he was a very bright spot in Superbad.“Yoda? Attack of the Clones?”
For me, he earned a lifetime pass for Birdman.
Wonder what movie you consider is your definition of ‘scary’ then.
Are you here to imply that the first movie was scary? Every scare was on the same beat, they were all telegraphed from miles away, and the (frankly dreadful) CGI took away any chance of decent horror being found anywhere in the film. It’s like they didn’t trust themselves as cinematographers despite having some very nice shots during the other parts of the movie.
Hereditary, The Descent, The Thing, The Witch, The Conjuring, The Silence of the Lambs
Don’t laugh. But the role that did it for me was him as General Custer in “Night at the Smithsonian.” He was just so deliriously goofy in a mostly forgettable movie.
Shit he earned a lifetime pass for Hot Rod.
His small role in Hot Rod is even better when you learn he based the character on a friend, and the tripping/welding accident/eye injury happened almost beat for beat in real life. The best part is that when his friend saw the movie, when that scene happened his friend was like, “that’s weird man, the same thing happened to me!” completely oblivious to the fact that it was based on him.
This is terrible, I thought the massive success of the first one would mean going full King this time around. All I want is a talking turtle dammit!
But is the turtle in it?
There’s another cameo, let’s say.
I have a theory that Bill Hader will eventually go down as one of the greatest actors of his generation. The man has range.
I know Barry (and to a lesser extent The Skeleton Twins) is what made everybody realize he has dramatic acting chops but him in the first 2 seasons of Documentary Now is an acting masterclass and all you need to know about his range (which seems to be limitless). He’s easily on my list of actors I could see win an Oscar in the next 10 years.
Yespecially! Documentary Now is what convinced me initially that he is brilliant. Skeleton Twins and Barry helped absolutely seal that.
The two-part finale of Documentary Now Season 2 is just… sublime? It’s wall-to-wall funny, and it all hinges on his line readings, which he nails from beginning to end (even while modulating his voice between the older version of the character doing voiceover and the younger version in the “archival” footage).
Bill Hader has been many things through the millennia.
He’s so great as Mickey.
Aaaah, I didn’t know he was Mickey! Just another reason to love him/Bob’s Burgers
Oh what a shame, I really wanted to watch “It”. Well, at least I’ll be able to afford two ice creams next time I go to the cinema.
The first was such a financial success precisely because it wasn’t scary. It was vey safe. It also wasn’t very good.Also, does it really take influence from Svankmajer or did you just want to name-drop that you know who Svankmajer is? Because I would be extremely surprised by the former.
I think the movie thinks it’s terrifying. LOOK AT THE CLOWN JUMP OUT OF A COFFIN! LOOK AT THE CLOWN SCREAM AND HIS HEAD SHAKES A LOT! LOOK AT THE CLOWN DO A DANCE STRAIGHT-FACED. This speaks more to the 10-year olds the film wants as its audience.
Very much this. It really does think it’s scary, but I found myself either rolling my eyes or laughing at Pennywise.The IT mini-series was awful, but Tim Curry’s Pennywise was genuinely disturbing to me.
I think Brother Bill’s performance is great, but they don’t give him anything to do other than bad dialogue and looking like he does.
I honestly hate the voice that he uses in the role, sounds more like Scooby Doo than anything I’d be afraid of even when he tries to swap to menacing.
I didn’t see the movie but I really loved Kellywise (SNL)
The first part with the kids is good. The actors did a fantastic job…. It was teh adults that just…. sucked.
The mini series gets a lot of undeserved hate. It was an early 90’s TV miniseries on ABC, there is only so much that they could do becasue of budget and tv restrictions.Given they had at least one hand tied behind their back, I think they did a fantastic job especially in the casting department. Tim Curry fucking nailed Pennywise, Ritter did a great job as Ben, Harry Anderson and Tim Reid made you care about Richie and Mike.Everytime I run across it on TV, I end up watching it.
There was an actual Killer Clown no need to be scared by a fake one in a movie.
Counter-point: The It miniseries was hamstrung but is still quite good, especially casting.It’s not perfect and sure, there’s some cheese. But the child and adult actors are spot fucking on. The *only* improvement in the film is Bev and even then it’s only because her hair is a better color. The actress herself is great.And a werewolf sister. But that’s tangential. (Ginger Snaps FTW)
Since Pennywise is kind of a major part of the proceedings and you enjoyed Curry’s performance, maybe, just maybe… the miniseries wasn’t “awful”?
There was one scene in Chapter 1 where I was genuinely creeped out by him and that was when they were watching the slide show. The way the mom morphed into him and the way he popped out was pretty freaky.
I did like that. That’s about the only sequence with It that I thought was really effective. Notice he didn’t talk or do much.
I loved the scene in the little preview they did and thought it was very effective until Pennywise actually jumped out as some awful looking CGI monstrosity. I was in love with how they updated them flipping through photo albums and just got disappointed. It generally fell into my big problem with the movie being its heavy reliance on CGI when it wasn’t strictly necessary and took away from any horror they were trying to create.
I thought part one was ok, but it still wasn’t really scary at all. I hate jump scares and they kept doing the jerky close up thing.
Yeah, it was a big hit because it was marketed to younger demos. I can’t believe how many kids in the 12-16 bracket have seen and love It
Name-dropping Svankmajer is a wank, major.
Hey! Some of us are pansies who are just happy to be able to watch a horror movie without having to turn it off every 10 minutes.
To be fair, the same is true of Stephen King’s books: they’re “scary stories” for midday summer on a towel on the beach, because they’re just as mild then as they are in the dead of night
There’s a scene near that start of the film that, I would say, yes, does call to mind Svankmajer and the Quays.
“(What won’t be familiar is an additional subplot that implies, without making explicit, new information about Richie’s sexuality.) “The interesting thing is that some of those who mostly got into It through the book have speculated for years about Richie’s sexuality – generally their interpretation was that Richie was bisexual and that Eddie was gay. From what I’ve heard of the film, Eddie’s sexuality is downplayed and Richie gets the main focus, although James Ransone has been very supportive of the idea (he’s actually flat out said in interviews that he believes the relationship some interpreted from the book is canonical). The book and the miniseries both coded the characters and the relationship (in the miniseries I think Eddie was originally supposed to have a male lover, but that was mostly taken out). I assume the same happened here to some degree, but I’m glad to hear they went further than many thought they would. This is a very complex relationship that goes back nearly 35 years and I tend to wonder if this is the closest we’ll get to seeing it displayed.
While the dead gay trope has been done to death (no pun intended), I also think that after years of coding and winking in many horror films, having a film that explicitly links homophobic violence with the most intrinsic of evil, and shows the struggle that abuse and trauma have on lgbt people, is important. Again, I just hope they did it justice, but even if they didn’t, I have to admire the effort (that sounds stupid, I know).I just love watching Bill Hader act – I think he’s one of the finest actors of his generation – so I am going to eventually watch the film for that reason (and I’m more than a little amused at how much the marketing has shifted to “Bill Hader is awesome, go see him!”), but Stan and Eddie are the two characters I most connect to. I know not to expect much with Stan, but I do hope they do Eddie justice. He’s a wonderful and very unique character, and Ransone seems extremely passionate about the role.
Eddie being gay is strange, considering his wife doesn’t seem to be a beard in the slightest. His whole thing is far more mommy-based than anything that screams gay.
I don’t know how she is in the film (well I’ve heard things but hearing isn’t seeing) but in the book I felt like she was a symbol of Eddie’s fear and repression, alongside his mommy issues. I suppose you could also interpret asexuality, rather than homosexuality, but there were various elements that made me lean toward the latter (the book’s description of his style and mannerisms, his view of Richie, that he was the main Loser who, if memory serves, was not attracted to Beverly, etc.).
Asexuality is very much how it reads to me. Like he’s with her more as a mother replacement than any actual sexual or reproductive desire.
Again. No. The movie takes a more roundabout approach to it, but the source material demonstrates literally everyone in the Losers Club is straight.No main character sees outside that scope. There are gay side characters and a LOT of mention of the shit the LGBT community faces, but this is just projection at this point
Nah, Richie I can definitely see as gay. And Eddie, Eddie would be terrified of STDs and all that.
Saying that (Eddie is asexual, not homosexual) your read is interesting. I’m glad Adrian Mellon at least gets a moment (played by Xavier Dolan no less!) because I do think the fact that a gay man is murdered is King definitely trying to relate the violence that LGBTQA+ face is in very much the same vein as the violence faced by Mike Hanlon from the Henry Bowers of the world in 1958.
I know there was also a lot of analysis about Adrian mirroring Eddie, but I do think Adrian is more important than just mirroring – or should be, anyway. I read a reviewer a few weeks back say that the movie doesn’t really carry the story out the way the book did (with the trial and closure, I assume). I guess Hollywood is only going to go so far (similar to downplaying the abuse Mike faced), but I do hope people can still take a message from what is on the screen, given the increasing hate crimes and general intolerance and ignorance.
King explicitly uses the Adrian Mellon story to link contemporary hostility toward gay people with 1950s-era hostility toward black people. It isn’t exactly a radical statement, but for a bestselling horror writer in the mid-80s (arguably Peak Homophobia in the US), it’s still remarkable.
Peak AIDS crisis as well.
Disagree. See my previous post.
King almost certainly never intended Adrian Mellon’s murder to be a commentary on the violence that the LGBTQ community faces, at least not in the way we currently regard such things. “It” was published in 1986, twelve years before Matthew Shepard was murdered; long before the nation gave any kind of shit about people being hurt or killed due to their sexual orientation. Mellon’s lover Don points out (in the book) that Derry is a deeply homophobic place, but that’s used in the context of pointing out how DIFFERENT Derry is from the mainstream, not as symptomatic of the violence gay people face everywhere.
I still find King’s description of Adrian as “rather childlike”, as well as his status as the only adult killed by Pennywise*, a bit problematic, and I suspect he wrote that chapter early on in the process, before he’d fully formed the basis of It’s character and motivations (I generously consider the “childlike” moniker to be a phrase added later by King to try and jam Mellon’s murder into It’s modus operandi, rather than a commentary on gay people in general). But I don’t think King intended Mellon to serve as anything other than another victim of It for Mike to consider in his decision to call the Losers home.
I think the movie, however, correctly updates the Mellon scene for today’s perspective, and is one of the few genuine improvements the film makes on the book.*Mike’s historical interludes show us that Pennywise has instigated the deaths of lots of adults, certainly, but in the periods of the book set in the 50’s and 80’s, it’s exclusively children that It kills…with the exception of Adrian Mellon (King states that It prefers children due to their oh-so-tasty imaginations).
The Adrian Mellon subplot is a near word-for-word retelling of the 1984 murder of openly gay 23-year-old Charlie Howard by a pack of homophobic teenagers in Bangor, Maine.http://bilerico.lgbtqnation.com/2014/10/the_conversion_of_a_queer-basher.phpHis death had a profound impact on King, who was years ahead of his time in recognizing the humanity of gay people. (For appropriate context, read And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts.)
Wow…thank you for this. I stand corrected. Had no idea King had based that on a real-life incident.
I dunno, I always felt that Pennywise would manipulate and capitalise on whatever the prevalent undercurrent of negativity was in any given time: before the 50s it was racism with the numerous town shootouts and the bar getting torched, and in the 80s it was gay panic. The guy he attacked was an out-of-towner and he amplified the mindsets of the gang that beat him in order to feed off the fear. In modern times it could be much the same, or have shifted to Islamophobia. Pennywise is a player, but he’s also an opportunist.
No. Literally everyone was attracted to Beverly. The book has a big fucking uncomfortable chapter that disproves anything about it.There is no “coding” besides what you’re trying to project.
That chapter (which, yes, is awful) is one of the examples for me that Eddie was generally not like the other boys, but that part of the book is so wretched it’s probably not worth discussing. Maybe we should just agree to disagree.
Wretched is a little strong. I get what King was attempting to do. He fails spectacularly but it’s not some henious, unforgivable thing unless you’re a prude.
“it’s not some henious, unforgivable thing unless you’re a prude.”
Nor is that what “wretched” means, so…
I grew up with the book and I absolutely think the Richie/Eddie relationship always read gay.
The way to remember has nothing to do with attraction and everything to do with unity and bonding. It doesn’t work outside King’s coke-addled mind, but it’s not really about being attracted to Beverly and wanting to have sex. It’s supposed to be something bigger than that. However it’s ultimately 10 and 11 years olds having sex and it’s fucking weird. Thankfully the portion about the birds is beautifully written and it’s never mentioned again after it happens, so it’s easy to gloss over.
Weeeellllll…. Also no.99% of people who talk about that scene get it wrong. It isn’t ABOUT sex. It’s about intimacy. But when you’re on the edge of puberty and haven’t figured out those adult concepts, it gets oversimplified. They know enough to know that couples who love each other have sex. So in a moment of panic, when they feel their psychic/emotional bond slipping, they perform a ritual act of intimate connection. Eddie could have been perfectly “in love” with Bev and still been homosexual or (as I agree) asexual. The scene is uncomfortable but it’s also fairly clear that none of them know what they’re doing. It’s not nearly the scandalous lunacy that dipshits make it out to be.
None of the children were attracted to Beverly in a sexual sense; they were all prepubescent. Ben had a schoolboy crush on her, which matured into something more, but they were all much too young for sexual arousal in the book (which makes the sewer gangbang all the more absurd).
It’s entirely possible that both Richie and Eddie were LGBT but given the time and place they grew up in were never fully able to explore what that meant.So they have a friendship built on this common feeling (both too young to really understand it), then they move apart…Eddie grows up and marries a woman like his mother. Not as a beard, but because the only relationships of meaning with women were his mom and Beverly. When the latter moved on, all he had was the former…and that was what he modeled future relationships on.Likewise Richie…who is a stand-up comic…could be trying to come to terms with what he’s suspected about himself, but because he’s trying to break into the entertainment biz wants to downplay/ignore because he fears it could hurt his career.
I don’t think I ever interpreted her as a beard necessarily but even as a kid reading It, I very much felt that Eddie was “supposed” to be gay. I guess I hadn’t really examined it much.
It just never passed through my head. Sex and Eddie seem a million worlds apart. Having Richie be a closeted homosexual makes complete sense to me, though, especially in context of his scene with Beverly in 11/22/63.
I think it’s both. The wife is an extension of the mother complex, but that does not preclude him being closeted or asexual. The Richie/Eddie relationship always read as bordering on loving to me in that way. And the virgin aspect with the very fey Dennis Christopher in the miniseries takes it further into a coded element.That said: Drafts of It dating back to 2010, before either Muschietti or Fukunaga (but including one of Fukunaga’s), have Richie gay. So it’s been something the studio picked up long ago.
Plus he was starting to have a thing for a girl (not Bev) back when he was young.
That doesn’t mean much.
It’s definitely not outside the realm of possibility that a closeted gay man could also have serious Mommy issues, but I agree with you. Clearly as originally written, anyway, Eddie’s not gay.
There’s no way either Eddie or Richie are canonically gay. I don’t really mind them making Ritchie gay in the film; it’s incidental to the plot and they’re not obnoxious about it.
But Stephen King, who I don’t believe for a second is a homophobe, has nonetheless had a very outsider approach to LGBT people, at least in the early part of career which encompasses “It” (I’m admittedly not familiar with latter-day King, and it’s certainly possible that he has evolved along with the nation). I don’t believe it would have occurred to him in a million years to include a gay character as one of his Losers, although it seems practically a necessity in this day and age (and almost certainly why they did so for the film). King’s Losers all had a specific defining outcast trait, and while homosexuality would definitely have been such a trait (particularly in the 50’s), King would have been incapable of writing a character like that with any subtlety. If Stephen King’s Ritchie Tozier was gay, we’d know it.
Yup, this is my take. I know there is the one line of Richie caressing Eddie’s cheek as he dies that everyone alludes to, but King does not deal in subtlety well, especially when it comes towards sexuality. Do not get me wrong, I loved Richie’s new story in the movie. It was really welcome and well done. That said, unless King comes out and says it, I do not see Richie as canonically gay in the book.
Is there a single attempt to build any character other than Bev?If so, it’s far ahead of the first one.
Unsurprising. I rewatched It this weekend, and it’s just not very good. A lot of it works under the dumb, perceived notion of “CLOWNS R SCARY, RIGHT???” mixed with erratic movement and unnecessary CGI. This sounds like a doubling down of a lot of that, instead of trying to capture the better parts of the film where, essentially, the kids hang out and are kids. The fact that the film tries to mirror the first is a good idea, as the entire novel is a reflection on then and now, but if there aren’t enough scenes of the Losers together just enjoying being together, the point is lost.It also sucks that they have some bullshit tearful farewell. One of the best parts of the book (outside the Black Spot) is the destruction of Derry and how, when it’s all over, everybody wants to get the fuck away from it.
I can’t say I’m surprised they let Derry off the hook, even though the people who live there have been infected by Pennywise’s generational evil and were often part of the horror of the place (making its destruction logical once P. is dispatched for good).
That’s what is scary here. Derry itself is bad. Pennywise lived under it for so long his evil sort of crept into the very land that town sits on. Clown aren’t scary but a town infected by the evil of an alien menace to the point where they literally either can’t or won’t see bad things is… terrifying. And oddly resonant with 21st century US.
I do like, however, how King twists it a little further, something that the movie does a little bit of very well: It isn’t the source of evil, it just prods people to give into those fears or desires. Even though in the film they have that evil It TV show playing, I love (well not love, but appreciate? )the idea that Beverly’s father isn’t under It’s control in the slightest, but simply feels uninhibited at doing what he does to his daughter. It would be dumb if it was It taking control and working through him kind of like he does Bowers. Instead, Beverly’s dad does as he would anyway. The idea that It only has so much control but that these evils are in people already is great. Like Beverly’s asshole husband. He’s evil, through and through. And It had no influence on him prior to the Losers returning to Derry. It complicates the idea of what evil is and it’s not simply a monster feeding on fear and negativity.
You’ve completely nailed it. A regional, generational horror is what made the book scary. The voices talking to Bev through the sink drain just blew my mind as a kid.
It’s kinda like how “Christine” is scary – it isn’t a possessed car that is scary. That’s just the surface level stuff. The truth horror in that book is for parents : It’s how the one character goes from being basically the kid every parent wants to being the kid no parent wants. King’s books are often like that. There is a surface level scare and then there is a deeper one – and unfortunately only the surface level scares translate to film.
I felt the same way about Hill’s NOS4A2. The main story is frightening enough, but all the kids who Manx turned into soulless, bloodthirsty monsters is straight-up disturbing.
The Shining being the ultimate example of that concept, obviously. Or Desperation’s cocktail of murderous demon on the surface vs the deeper implications of an Old Testement God that doesnt give a shit about your well being.
In 11/22/63 the main character travels through Derry and runs into child-aged Richie and Bev. He passes a couple of places referenced in IT and can feel the evil radiating out of it.
As mixed as I get with some of the King crossover points, this is one I genuinely really liked. Besides it being a nice surprise to see Bev and Richie one more time, I really liked how, just being around Derry, Jake gets the sense there’s a sort of rot within the town – not seeing Pennywise (or even a trace of him, save for some graffiti), but just the sense of this malignancy that’s so omnipresent that most of the residents either don’t notice and are carried along by it, or simply shrug their shoulders, keep their heads down, and act like it doesn’t effect them.
It’s part of why I’m so disappointed this version is downplaying The Black Spot – that idea that It has become a sort of cancer in the heart of the town to the point where even when it’s not on the hunt its influence is there is a genuinely creepy idea.
I haven’t seen the first one yet (keep meaning to get around to it), but my first take was that this version of Pennywise goes too far into freakshow territory. Pennywise as described in the book looked like a clown to the point where he was able to walk around unremarked upon, but when you really looked at him was just wrong in some fundamental way. Only when he was alone with kids did he become straight terrifying. It’s like what you say about Derry in general – it looks like a normal down, but there’s something sick right under the surface. Many of the town’s tragedies involved people just ignoring terrible things that were happening right in front of them.
In all honesty, the movie had two options – either try to do Tim Curry better than Tim Curry (Not really possible) or go the exact opposite way Curry played the character. They chose the latter and I can’t really blame them all that much for that choice… Because you just can’t out Curry Tim Curry.
Option 3: Don’t do Pennywise.Here’s the thing. Pennywise in the book was a disguise that the Bob Gray entity could use to get close to children. And in the mid-20th century pop culture landscape, a goofy TV type clown (the book says he’s like Clarabell and Ronald McDonald) made sense. Going back to his history in the late 1800s and early 1900s, a clown again made sense. If the movie wanted to update the eras during which the narrative takes place, if it was going to fuck around with character backstories and thematic resonance, it *makes sense* to update the antagonist. TV clowns weren’t really a thing anymore by the 1980s. Any retort that Pennywise IS definitively the villain of It is fucking baseless given all the other stupid changes made in the adaptation. Pennywise works best in the context of the book timeline. If you change that, why not change Pennywise?
Interesting. Then what would the modern day (well, 90’s I guess when they were kids) equivalent be? Maybe a Superman-type?
Unfortunately I think the best possible substitution would be a Muppet/puppet of some kind, heavily influenced by Sesame Street. Which brings its own set of cliches and difficulties of suspension of disbelief.An interesting thing about It being set in the 50s is how relatively homogenous kids entertainment was. As you get closer to the 70s and 80s you start to see greater gradations by age, gender, and interest.A superhero could be interesting but they weren’t as ubiquitous outside the confines of comic books by the 80s. And unlike clowns, superheroes don’t really exist.IMHO, Pennywise is pretty great and a useful embodiment of the oddity and underlying paranoid “wrongness” of adults. But he also works better in the eras of the novel.So. You know. Make it a fucking period piece. Like the miniseries.(And I apologize if that seems like a TL;DR setup for a complaint about the film vs the miniseries. That adaptation is also pretty flawed, constrained as it was by network TV S&P and a TV budget. But it gets so much more right that I think *matters*.)
Sports team mascot? Youtuber?
TV Clowns were dying out, sure, but Bozo the Clown was still very much a thing in the 1980s. Looking it up, it even lasted until 2001, which was a surprise. But both Boomer kids (as in the book) or Gen X kids (as in the movie) would be familiar with them. Granted, Millennials probably are more familiar with parodies like the Simpsons’ Krusty.
I’m Gen X (or Xennial if you buy into that further distinction) and there’s no way I or my peers would have felt okay about seeing a clown just out in the world. By my generation they were already getting the Gacy creepo vibe in the collective subconscious. Bozo might have been *around* but not like he was in the 50s and 60s.Again, just leave the movie in the 50s and 80s. What advantage was there to updating the timeline? Can we suddenly not relate to kids if their decade and our decade aren’t 1:1? One of the appeals of King’s storytelling is that the themes and character archetypes are fairly universal.
The timeline in the book was modern times. So I can understand just keeping it that way so that chapter 2 is modern times.
Modernity is not an important theme in the book.
The book takes place in the time it was written. They made the movie basically do the same. This is not a big deal nor did it take anything away from the book. Secondly it allowed them to change most of the horror references which are not scary in 2019.
It’s a big deal if the plot is to make the most sense. Pennywise doesn’t make sense as a lure to 80s kids (in the book the kids during the “now” portion don’t seem at all tempted by him anymore). You don’t care? Okay. I do. You’re right about it not changing the book. It just makes the adaptation not as good as it could have been. And WHAT updated horror references? Zombies? Big fucking deal! Scoring scare points was not the reason for those references. The novel came out in the 80s. Do you think the Teenage Werewolf or Crawling Eye references were a big shocker then?I would argue that the power of the novel isn’t even that it’s scary. It’s the fantastic character work (which the movie fucked up) and thematic resonance (which the movie only got half right).
Pennywise still makes sense in the 80s as clowns are still a thing especially to a kid Georgie’s age. The fear of a sadistic clown also works in the 80s context to anyone that’s seen Poltergeist.
I *was* a kid Georgie’s age in the 80s. I liked clowns at the circus. I wouldn’t have trusted a clown not at the circus. Especially one as OBVIOUSLY EVIL as Billy Skaar. Again, the miniseries got it right. That Pennywise had some charm. That makeup seemed relatively benign. The movie Pennywise is a monster from the jump.
Bit we live in 2019 – it’s a federal law that every property ever made must get at least two remskes.
I think it’s potentially interesting if It doesn’t really understand the cultural changes that have taken place, and thus doesn’t get as much mileage out of his Pennywise disguise (Pennyguise?) in the ‘80s as he used to. But yeah, they’d need to consciously lean into that, instead of just defaulting to “he wrote a clown in the book so it’s a clown in the movie.”
The movie understandably leans into Spoopy Klown nonsense, largely ignoring the sense of overall dread that worms its way into all their lives. As fond as I am of the miniseries it didn’t nail that aspect either. But that’s what happens when you try to adapt a 1000 page novel down to 4-6 hours. I believe in trying to take any piece of art on its own merits but I also believe in honest assessments of those efforts. The Muschetti film was not good. From the reviews I’ve read the second one is more true to the book but still a mess. And with yet more unnecessary additions and confusing subtractions.But it will probably make plenty of money so I’ll have to hear bullshit defenses and nonstop clickbait social media posts from the horror sites I follow. Blech.
The best scare in the first one was when the librarian was staring at Ben, out of focus, in the background. And every time the camera cut away, she was suddenly closer to him.
I wish the first movie (and from the sound of it, the second) would have gone further in that direction – the dread, as you said, that no one in authority is going to help them, and in fact are part of the problem.
You raise a really, really good point, but what would a 2010s equivalent “trusted, harmless character associated with fun and whimsy” be? some kind of mascot?
I think the best equivalent, which would be extremely difficult to pull off, is a Muppet/Sesame Street style puppet. Failing that, maybe a Fred Rogers type Benevolent Adult Host.To a point I made elsewhere, the problem of a contemporary version of this story as it relates to Pennywise is that kids now have a much more varied and individually-targeted cultural experience. In mid-century America there was a more concerted effort to appeal to as broad and homogenous an audience as possible. Pennywise the Clown worked in part because of how many kids were familiar with/fans of Howdy Doody and Bozo and whatever local kids show host clown they had.
“TV clowns weren’t really a thing anymore by the 1980s.”
Pssst, you couldn’t walk past a TV in the 80s without seeing 50 McDonald’s commercials.
Ronald wasn’t a clown. He just looked like that. It’s a skin condition and he’s very self conscious about it.
A clown appearing on TV is not a “TV clown”. There’s a distinction. In local markets during the 50s and 60s there were kids shows *hosted* by clowns. It was a TV fad. Ronald popping in for a 30 second commercial spot isn’t the same.
‘If you change that, why not change Pennywise?’
Because you can almost bet money that you’ll get a shitload of people who won’t think it through as much as you have asking ‘Where’s the clown?’
(That said, I am now wondering what would be the better alter ego for It to assume in the framework of the 1980s.)
What would you suggest?
I would suggest reading further down the thread where I answer this a few times.Sorry. That probably sounds snarky.Overall? I would suggest NOT updating/contemporizing the story. Childhood fear, friendship between outcasts, the friction between children and grownups, the tension of puberty/growing up… these are all universal enough that a particular time frame shouldn’t matter. Leave it the 50s and 80s.
I love how you say it doesn’t matter, but then proceed to post about how it has to be set in the late 50s for reasons you say, don’t matter.
You’re conflating two points. *Logistically* the time frame matters because of the *relative* ubiquity of clowns in pop culture. It makes *logical* sense to keep the time frame 50s and 80s. *Thematically* and as it relates to *character development* the time frame doesn’t matter because the themes and character archetypes are fairly universal. There is no *logistical* nor *thematic* reason to update the eras from 50s/80s to 80s/today. The ONLY justification for the era update is a facile, bullshit one: relatability. The assumption that audiences require a 1:1 ratio between themselves and the characters they’re watching. And no genre is as guilty of this stupidity as horror because of an attached idea of immediacy. The assumption that nothing can be scary if it’s not IMMEDIATE. Which makes sense given how much Mushyshitty employs cheap jumps.
“In all honesty, the movie had two options – either try to do Tim Curry better than Tim Curry (Not really possible) or go the exact opposite way Curry played the character.”
No they didn’t. There are countless ways they could’ve gone with Pennywise, many of which could’ve included character design that doesn’t make him look so scary that no child -fear of clowns or not- would E-V-E-R approach him or NOT run away from him on sight.
I’ve never read the book, but from the descriptions on this thread, it sounds like David Lynch is the only director who can do it any justice
The town itself as the primary antagonist is what made the book so special. The film barely touches on that, opting for special effects and jump scares instead, and that’s why it fails.
Personally I don’t find clowns all that scary. Not having seen either part of this adaptation I can’t say for sure but I can guess that I’d hardly find that to be the scary part.What made the book scary, though, wasn’t that “It” was a clown. What made it scary was a more lovecraftian horror of something that was simply alien in every way, didn’t care about right or wrong and worked by it’s own rules that had to be guessed rather than learned. You had to figure out what frame of reality that monster lived in and confront it there rather than bringing it into our frames of reference. Which is why what the kids did in the book made sense – it was moving in a realm of unreality where it made their fears reality so making their fantasies reality was what worked. And, honestly, apart form the imagery of a creepy clown, that is what made that book scary and why I argue any literal adaptation into TV or film is doomed to failure. To be honest, both the miniseries and the movie succeed or fail on the same thing : Does the guy playing Pennywise do it well? Like I said – I haven’t seen the movie (Keep meaning to but life get’s in the way) but I’ll say that Tim Curry seemed to be having fun so that made an otherwise horrible TV miniseries into something to remember. From what I understand, the movie actor seems to also sink his teeth into that performance so that might be enough to keep it going.
Skaarsgard’s performance is great but they give him nothing to do other than be surrounded by unnecessary visual effects. They really don’t get what made the book terrifying was how irrational the shit these kids were scared of was, and how that makes it worse. How being a kid is fucking terrifying because of your imagination.
King also captures in his young characters how terrifying the world is when you realize that your fears are real and no adult is going to rescue you.
So true. I have an intense memory of being left in the car alone when I was under 4 when my mom went into the piano teacher’s house to get my brother. It felt like I was in the car alone for hours (couldn’t have been more than 5 minutes.) I was convinced the telephone poles were coming to get me, bending down towards the car to grab me.
That’s really awesome now and totally terrifying for you at age 4.
I think that’s a big part of what makes adapting King’s work so difficult no matter what book it’s coming from: the vast majority of terror in his books occurs via things happening inside the mind of a character. The inability to convey that internal dialogue King excels at hamstrings all of these projects from the start.
I also found it very overrated. Even in terms of simple scares, once it’s apparent that Pennywise is trying to scare rather than kill them, he ceases to be scary.
I mean, he scares then kills. Else the meat doesn’t taste as good. You also never get the sense that It thinks it’s eternal and omnipotent like as represented by the books. Every setback It faces we learn it found ways to justify, until they actually made this truly formless horror reconsider everything. It’s one of my favorite sections of the book, because we’re finally allowed into It’s mind near the end, and It’s horrified at the concept that it could actually die, something it has convinced Itself long ago was not remotely possible.
It seemed like he killed Bill’s brother quickly, and then afterward just kept focusing on scares rather than kills.
reminds me of the Nostalgia Critic’s joke about how he kills a few random characters quickly. “wait, what? that’s it? you’re not going to gloat about floating balloons at them first?!”
It’s like the Watchmen adaptation. They took some scenes and faithfully recreated them but either didn’t get or simply didn’t care about the characters or the story.
As for Pennywise? Tim Curry was WAY scarier as a basically normal-looking clown. Skarsgaard is fine, but the character design is so over the top and ridiculous that nobody would ever confuse him for just a normal clown.
That’s exactly what I felt about Curry’s Pennywise. The truly scary parts were the scenes where he’s just standing in broad daylight and the Derry residents think he’s just a normal clown. The Pennywise appearance is supposed to be a lure to attract kids – no kid would go anywhere near Skarsgaard’s over the top ‘scary clown’ depiction.
This.
Fucking this so Goddamn much.
There’s aspects of that first movie I will admit I liked, but the design of Pennywise has bugged me ever since they first announced it because it’s so overtly ‘EVIL CLOWN’.
Especially since the clown persona was, at least in part, supposed to serve as a lure to children. When I saw the new design, all I could think was “…if Georgie saw that and didn’t run, I’m sorry, Bill – your brother just might be too stupid to live.”
All it takes is one average review for the overrated circle jerk to start up. You’re not impressing anyone.
Sorry I didn’t like the not very good movie that you did and that I think the follow-up will probably also be lousy! It’s my favorite King book so it’s something I’ve spent a bit of time thinking about, but hey, you’re right! It’s just a circlejerk. Also: the movie isn’t overrated. It’s simply not good.
get ‘im, Bruce!
I saw the first It movie with my wife’s 12-year-old cousin, and her one thought after the movie was, “it was fun, but it wasn’t a scary.” A 12 year old kid not thinking it was scary summed it up for me.
I know adults who were terrified. Is the movie scary has a subjective answer rather than an absolute.
Well I hope they enjoyed their first horror movie
OR people just react to things differently.
Yes like how insecure people react to opinions they don’t like with “well opinions are subjective!”
You are calling me insecure for pointing out the very obvious thing that your subjective take is not the 100% black and white truth? Ok bro.
yes, because like you somehow seem both aware and not aware of, it didn’t need to be called out and you did that just as a means of devaluing an opinion you don’t agree with
the way the town of Derry is the primary evil, all the mood setting that needs to go along with that, i always felt It would be a good 2-season TV show. Otherwise, too many small-but-vital pieces will get left out.
‘It’ felt like a belated and uninspired Freddie Kruger sequel. I had to go online to see which came first – Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Street of King’s It.Craven’s film predates King’s novel – although the latter’s disparate time frame helped distinguish it. But the recent film adaption seemed more indebted to a film series that had run its course than a beloved novel that had stood the test of time.
I’m a huge King fan and It is my favorite novel of his, and that has never been because I find clowns scary or because there’s anything especially scary about the book. It’s the way he creates characters, especially children, and how deeply he makes you care for them. I really liked Chapter One because I felt that it was successful about making us care about the Losers, and that it was as good of an adaptation of their timeline as a standard-length movie could be. The jump scares and CGI I could have done without.If Chapter Two leans even more heavily into CGI clowns and a more surface-level reading of the story, it won’t be surprising but it will be disappointing.
Same with the original mini-series getting worse once the kids were gone. Can we blame the source material?
So if I’m interpreting you correctly you’re saying not enough space turtle?
“The Turtle will save us!” – Not the makers of this film, apparently
Yeah, but is there a giant spider at the end?
As we have all now learned from Dave Chappelle’s most recent Netflix special, you said buckshot, but meant birdshot.
Are we looking for our mainstream horror movies to actually be scary though? Like Us was decidedly not scary, it was full of jokes.
As a jaded adult, I can’t remember the last time I found a movie “scary.”
That weird looking mole that I’m pretty sure wasn’t there before? That’s scary. That mortgage renewal, or that job “restructuring” that could result in unemployment? Those are scary. A fictional monster jumping at a camera with a loud noise… meh… that’s a movie.
I’ve stopped judging horror movies based on whether they’re scary. They aren’t. I just want to know if I’m going to be interested or entertained for a few hours.
Hereditary fucked me up.
I’m sorry to hear that. It left me with male pattern baldness. Genetics are a bitch.j/kYeah, haven’t seen that one yet. May have to give it a shot.
Last genuinely scary movie for me was Event Horizon. Though I think I was in my early teens when that came out.
Since then, it was mainly ‘jump’ scares, audio scares, and insane amounts of gore, all stuff that wasn’t so much scary as startling and designed to manipulate the viewer like a sitcom laugh track.
That’s an interesting question that got me thinking, as an adult, what is the last horror movie I saw that I found legitimately scary? I’m going to go with The Ring (American). That is the last film I remember watching that legitimately scared me, and I’ve watched a TON of horror films since then.
Not a movie, and not horror, exactly, but I found Chernobyl scary. It’s just most supernatural stuff that isn’t scary anymore.
Are scary movies supposed to be “scary” or just some place on the unsettling spectrum? Chernobyl had a powerful, consistent mood of tension/unsettling/appalling that rivaled any “scary” movie…
Exactly. True stories can be fucking scary. Chernobyl had so much dread and captured the period perfectly.
I’m a horror fan in my 40’s and was feeling the same way until I saw Hereditary. Just messed me up in a great, deep way.
A few years back, I was actually wondering if a horror movie could scare me anymore. They can disturb me or gross me out with graphic violence, body horror, etc., or make me uncomfortable by depicting real-life horrors in a heightened fictional setting (like The Woman), but could they actually still scare me? Very soon after I had that internal dialogue, I watched The Babadook, and lo and behold it actually scared me! It had one foot in the “heightened real-life horrors” (being a single parent to a emotionally disturbed kid), but some combination of the directing and acting went beyond that. The sense of dread and “something horrible is going to happen” built throughout the movie, then the sequence where the Babadook is crawling along the ceiling while the protagonist drags herself across the floor below had my heart pounding out of my chest. I didn’t even notice til the scene ended and I realized my whole body had unclenched and my heart was going a mile a minute. I haven’t gotten that intense a feeling from another horror movie since, but its nice to know its still possible. It also made me laugh extra hard at the bit in the show “You’re the Worst” where Vernon warns a whole party of people “Do NOT see The Babadook you guys, its way too scary!”
that job “restructuring” that could result in unemployment? Those are scary.My company is currently in the process of going through a merger, and this is too real.
Same, I avoid horror because it’s rote and predictable. The last one I truly loved was The VVitch. Mostly because of the atmosphere. 9r maybe Us, because it was trying to say something. And I A24 has made some great ones.But supernatural horror especially is generally very weak across the board.
Once you realize the 4 baddies are just stylishly posturing and that the main family is in no real threat because the movie isn’t going to hurt these characters it becomes really lame. Especially the kid wearing the suuper spooky mask and Lupita’s schlocking it up with the voice and crazy eye thing while delivering exposion. A then a climax that feels ripped from Annihilation. After a few scenes you get it. Stylish, little substance, no scares
I didn’t think Us was quite as extreme as IT in that regard. Like the dad really was going to get tossed off the boat. But you’re right that it was less scary than it could have been.
I did love the part when Offred asked Alexa Ophelia to call the police and it started playing “Fuck the Police” by NWA, haha.
Once I realized that they weren’t going to kill any of the family members, the tension just evaporated. You clearly weren’t supposed to like Tim Heidecker’s family so seeing them brutally murdered felt like nothing to me. Hereditary certainly isn’t a perfect movie but at least they had the balls to kill that kid.
Maybe it’s since I mainly got into horror through comedies, but I prefer when films have some tonal shifts, so it can make it even more jarring when they seem to relieve the tension but ramp it up even more. (Like Us takes a random jab at digital home assistants and it made the scene extra disorienting to me, after thinking I got the hang of the film up to that point.)
Us sucked in every way.
I don’t think I’ve ever been scared of any horror movie, outside of the first two Alien movies. Granted I saw them when I was 5.
Even though Nightmare on Elm Street was one of my favorites it didn’t scare me at all. And The Conjuring was basically the least scary horror flick I’ve ever seen as well, everyone I knew said it was soo scary and it was just another ghost/demon movie.
Us is a movie that definitely had characters telling inappropriate jokes at the absolute worst moments. It was like they wrote a script, looked at it and said, “Every scene needs a joke whether that kills the tension or not.”
I went through childhood as somebody who thought that he wouldn’t like anything “scary”, and so I never even tried to watch horror movies or read scary fiction. Several years ago I decided to check this assumption out by diving into horror to see if it was really frightening. I have gone through lists of “scariest movies of all time” trying to find something I would feel “scared” by. Haven’t found it yet. Sudden jump scares can be startling, and realistic torture ala “Audition” can be revolting, but frightening? No. All the horror movies I have liked , it has been for the drama or the comedy.
You jumped in at the wrong time. Horror is powerful as a kid. I avoided sewer grates and man holes for the longest time. In the shower my mind would fuck with me as a 12 year old thinking IT would come up at any time. In that respect IT is horror incarnate.
Yeah, the people who go on about AUDITION being a scary/frightening film haven’t seen enough movies and like to agree with other people because it validates them.
THE EXORCIST is the only movie that still scares me, and I’ve seen everything.
Silence of the Lambs was the last movie to genuinely scare me; that lights-out basement scene, specifically. Jaws remains the scariest movie I have ever seen.
Piling on to Us – that movie was not scary. It was not good. It was not “this is hilariously bad and therefore fun”. I think part is being a grown up. Most movies don’t scare me in the way they did when I was younger obviously. But I always chase that feeling with some hope. I watch whatever the “Best Horror Movie Of the YEAR!” is – and I usually enjoy them (It Follows, The Witch etc.) but they’re hardly scary. They typically have redeeming qualities- some really well shot scenes and a fantastic setting in the former, solid moments of nightmare fuel in the latter. But man, Hereditary is just pure win. The performances, directing, plot points, effects… it’s not the most original premise, but it’s just so incredibly well made. It is probably the scariest thing I’ve seen in years as a result of how effective it was top to bottom.
I give Peele credit for swinging for the fences, but Us is a pretty big miss. Then again, expectations were huge after Get Out. Even is Us had been legitimately good, it probably still would have felt like a letdown.
Annihilation was pretty fucked up. And a solid film. But may not fall under main stream…
Didn’t Henry Bowers die in part 1?
He took a real nasty spill down the standpipe and should be dead, but no.
It makes sense insofar as they weren’t sure when they made the first one if they’d get to do Chapter Two, but damn it was egregious.
What about the giant spider? What about the gangbang?
Nobody wants to watch the latter if it’s all adults. What are you, some kind of sicko?
Chris Hansen… or Randy Travis?!
I’d be game for watching Barry and Professor X double team Murph
LOL
I wish Stephen King would reissue the book and take out the fucking gangbang.
And Patrick Hockstetter.
Meh… “Not Scary” describes basically every decent horror movie I’ve seen in the last decade. I don’t go to horror movies because they’re scary, because they’re movies and movies aren’t really scary… I go to be entertained. I assume this is still entertaining, so I’ll go.
I was entertained. Was it fine cinema? I neither know nor care. I am not emotionally attached to the source material so there’s nothing I need to be outraged about on that score. I had fun. The three hours went pretty fast, I though.
Chüd is a Tibetan ritual. And, oh no.
I’d just assumed (incorrectly, it would appear) that it was a ritual by and for cannibalistic humanoids who didn’t have any specific subsurface dwelling patterns but who subsisted solely upon a mysterious substance known only as Üterbraten.
Our decidedly scruffy American C.H.U.D is the Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dweller. No relation to it’s Tibetan namesake, of course, but it is a delightfully unhinged movie with an absurdly entertaining commentary track, which I endeavor to champion at every opportunity.
I sadly kind of assumed part 2 wasn’t going to be that good when i noticed the other day that “holy shit it comes out in a week” and I haven’t seen barely any marketing or critical hype for this movie whatsoever. Usually not a great sign when the studio says “meh we’re not even gonna bother paying for advertising for this.”
awwwwww…massive disappointment. although i will say that “part 1″ was never really scary for me (it takes a lot to scare me these days) so i’ll probably enjoy it anyway.
you did finally see it. it was ok. too long. too many endings.
“Even more so than Finn Wolfhard did as a young Richie in Chapter One, Hader picks up the whole movie, puts it in his pocket, and walks away with it.”
Whoa, whoa, whoa, what? Finn Wolfhard walked away with the first movie? Young Richie was maybe the most obnoxious, annoying, punchable characters in the history of film.
CONTAINS POSSIBLE SPOILERSIf you saw the original “It,” you already knew that everything with the adults totally sucked. I’m curious how this one handled the original movie ending:SPOILERS BELOW Do they still shoot a giant bug-alien’s glowing belly with silver nuggets from a slingshot? Because…wow. It’s hard to imagine a more on brand Stephen King progression than the very cool, very creepy opening set piece of a clown in the sewer to, like 4 hours later, a bunch of boring adults shooting a giant bug-alien in its glowing stomach with silver nuggets from a slingshot. Woof.
Cilia in a lung, maybe.
The kids were the only part I liked about the first one.
Nah they were the worst part.
“In fact, the best Pennywise scene in It Chapter Two is one that was invented for the film, where the clown lures a lonely little girl under the bleachers at a high school football game, then chows down on her head with its layers of deep-sea creature jaws.”Anyone remember what a Spoiler Alert used to be? Or, maybe Spoiler Space?
Reviews are increasingly like that, I feel. Tell us what you think of the film, not specifically what happened. Oh, well.
LOL, yeah, we all love vague impressions backed up by “I can’t tell you why”
But now you know it’s the best scene. You’ll be ready.
“Ah, yes. The stadium. This is the head eating scene. Time to hit the bathroom and grab a beer.”
Even when she says she won’t spoil the (new) ending, she goes right ahead and does. I laughed at the shitty caveat she presented.
I’m still trying to figure out the awkwardness of the title here. It needs some word movement and at least one comma.
You forget you are dealing with yuppies who are too busy blowing on their pumpkin spice latte’s and trying to be cute and relevant rather than caring about context and ministration. Just look at the majority of the comments. I can imagine the beanies in 100 degree weather just reading them.
Anyone remember what a Spoiler Alert used to be? Or, maybe Spoiler Space?You’re a spoiler troll. Your claim is bullshit.The author didn’t give away any important plot details, the person killed was just a redshirt.Spoiler troll!!
It seems like they just don’t give a shit. The line of argument seems to be “some people like spoilers, and maybe you should just assume there are spoilers so I don’t have to bother editing my writing for a general audience.”
Generally, I find that critics who absolutely fucking hate a movie are going to pack their review with spoilers. For obvious reasons, but it’s sad because angry rants are the reviews I like reading the most, until they blow the whole ending because they’re so pissed.
I’m normally pretty anti-spoiler, but this one feels really minor. It’s a scene that has no major impact on the story, and if you know anything at all about Pennywise (including having seen Chapter One), what else could you possibly expect to happen after he lures a child under the bleachers?
Whine whine whine
It’s katie rife. Did you expect better?
I get your point, but this is really a pretty mild spoiler. It’s incidental to the main story, and it’s a foregone conclusion from the very beginning of the scene. “Clown kills child” isn’t much of a spoiler in a film about a clown that kills children.
I just feel it’s an indicative of a larger problem on nuAVClub.
I don’t disagree with that.
LOL @ expecting pre-Kinja AV Club from this stable of “writers”.
Reflecting on this now during the ‘recaps’ era. It got so much worse from here.
I guess I should have noticed the omen this wouldn’t be the best: I was at the DragonCon parade and there was a silent Pennywise, standing around, looking creepy and a little girl in a princess dress and a dragon mask just flounced over, looked him up and down and turned away, no fear.
Sucks about the movie, but I’m thrown by the headline.Shouldn’t it read …It Chapter 2 Sinks instead of Floats?
Bloody-Disgusting seems to be saying much the same, which is unfortunate given how hard they championed Part 1. Still going in with high hopes, though, as a lot of the criticisms I’ve read seem to also apply to the first movie (which I loved). Also, I really want to know how this movie possibly acknowledges Svankmajer. My only guess is the Chinese buffet, which is exciting.
Geez the comments on that Bloody Disgusting review (about the reviewer) are pretty harsh. I guess people take their movies seriously though.
Yeah, the BD community is… rough, to put it kindly. I tried to get a writing job with them a few years back, but I’m kind of glad I didn’t, since I take that sort of thing to heart too easily.
The first movie was not all that scary. The scariest scenes were those between Bev and her father, and that real type of evil was way more disturbing than any supernatural element. Also weird how sexual abuse of Bev was only very, very mildly hinted at in the book (does he ever touch you?), but it was front and center explicit in the movie.
I liked the first movie a lot as a coming of age movie with a terrific group of kid actors. As a horror movie it was a bit of a letdown.
It’s telling that the film felt it needed to invent a scene where a kid brutally murdered. The scene with Georgie in the first film felt pointlessly excessive, and the film…while tense…leaned heavily on jump scare + orchestral sting to its own detriment.So this seems to be more of the same? I don’t need bloody to be scary, but if this can’t even do MOODY like the first one…I’ll guess I’ll wait until it’s on streaming?
That’s almost how the book goes though, it’s an almost identical scene.
Ah. I have not read the book.
It’s a good thing I don’t listen to critics or I would never see a good movie or enjoy mediocre movies as well.
This part of the story is just difficult to tell as part of a visual medium. In the book you meet these screwed-up grownups and in concert spend time with their child selves, all of whom were subject to some combination of abuse, bullying, racism, etc. Thus they are terrorized by the their demons – both of this Earth and not – pretty much throughout and you feel like they never have really become confident, resourceful grownups. But in the mini series and movie you have to sort of disconnect the two or its too difficult to follow. Thus the grownups are far less vulnerable and its much harder to build a sense of dread or fear.
The best part of IT part 1 was the kids – to the point where I frequently found the horror aspects of IT irritating and in the way of a much more interesting story. Pennywise was ‘scary’ primarily because he seemed to stand around and doa . bunch of weird twitching motions a lot.
I really had no interest in Part 2 because its most interesting element – those kids – had grown into adults. Now I have less.
I found the kids to be the worst part of It. It was like the movie was trying to imitate Stranger Things. Hell, they even cast one of the same actors.
The film was cast before Stranger Things aired – so no, it wasn’t.
Stranger Things is an homage to properties like the original It. It had the schtick first and was cast first.
Which is hilarious, because Stranger Things takes copious amounts of ideas from It, and It was filmed before Stranger Things even aired.
That’s where the team behind the films painted themselves into a corner. Even in the book the most interesting part is the kids, which is why King’s narrative goes back and forth. It is in its essence a coming-of-age story, after all.The kids supposedly appear in this film too, but I’m not sure to what extent or which roles they play in the story since the first film already dealt with most of their activities in the book.
I do not think violence to children is entertainment.Honestly I don’t understand the appeal of most horror.
Just do King books as close-ended miniseries. Not everything has to be a film that can’t possibly include all the nuance, or a “reimagined” miniseries that extends a book to 5 seasons.
I didn’t like Chapter One much. So this is unsurprising. It smacked of King having no clue what he was doing. There was no cohesion.
Hm. I really liked the first movie, but didn’t think it was that scary… which I appreciated. The kids’ acting was great, and the setting update worked. So I might just like this second part fine. I might be in the minority but I don’t think the book It was all that scary. Good, and gripping and all, but… didn’t scare me too much for some reason.
Since Chastain is in both, I’m gonna say It (at least the novel) and The Tree of Life have some superficial similarities: (spoiler) They’re both about unhappy adults getting over their depressions by remembering their lyrical (and very lyrically rendered) childhoods (end spoiler); King and Malick are both romantics, in the general sense of the term—thinking there’s more to mundane life, a hidden beauty and way the universe works that is profound. I thought this adaptation should have been a ten part miniseries. The first movie really spent too much time on its horror scenes (which came one after another) when the heart of the book was childhood evocation. It did render that well, but those scenes were too few.
I don’t like to be scared, and I was thinking of not seeing this because giant (spoiler) are, especially on the big screen. In the book, I didn’t have to visualize it. But I hope the film, like Malick’s movies, capture the sadness the adult characters have.
Personally I didn’t find the first one scary so much as a well made horror movie. It takes a lot to scare me though, I have a halloween birthday so horror has made up most my life, in both movies and parental abuse! …too dark? Too dark.
I honestly rarely found horror movies scary, not in a “I’m so brave, praise me” way, but when people say “scary”, they usually just mean jump scares, which are indeed scary, but not in a way I find appealing. At best, solid horror movies are unsettling or creepy. For example, I found Hereditary just unsettling and too reliant on shock value. I dug the first Insidious movie for its effective jump scares, and the second one for its Shining-esque thrills. I legitimately can’t think of a single movie where I was like “Okay, that was some scary shit”.The original It miniseries was creepy. The novel felt more like an adventure with coming-of-age drama and trauma, which I thought the first of the new movies captured incredibly well. If the second one follows up in that regard, I’m happy.
The word that comes to mind for me is tension. Films like The Shining, The Witch, The Babadook, etc… I wasn’t necessarily scared watching them most of the time, but I was very very tense. Like, my muscles were all clenched for a long period of time and I didn’t even realize it. That’s what I want out of a horror film, not jump scares. The one film that comes to mind that was great at both is Alien. Several great shocking jump scenes, but it also still had that feeling of tension and dread overlaying the whole thing.
The Babadook did such a great job of building tension that by the time it got to the sequence where the Babadook is crawling along the ceiling above the protagonist it was almost unbearable. That got my heart pounding in a way no horror movie has in a long time, when that scene ended I realized I had been holding my breath, clenching my fists, etc.
American horror just isn’t effective. The Japanese horror industry has some incredibly scary films, as does the French nouveau horror wave.
A BIG part of it is the hype a horror movie receives before I see it. When I go in completely unguarded and unaware it’ll be any good, that’s when it sticks with me. Like the mannered, unstoppable, meaningless brutality of The Strangers. Was not expecting the movie to be halfway decent or go that dark, so it nailed me.
I was always a bit surprised at the almost universally positive reviews for the first It. I thought the first movie was decent, but also suffered from some weak dialogue and broad characters. I also thought some of the child actors didn’t quite hit the mark either. Nothing terrible, as King’s dialogue often doesn’t translate well to screen, but not nearly as good as the buzz seemed to be. Still, I’ll likely see this (though probably not in theaters).
I’m a huge fan of the book but man I was so disappointed in part 1, this news doesn’t surprise me.Each scene in part 1 was like a paint-by-numbers horror vignette, and the quick cuts between scenes made everything feel so hurried, like we were being ushered from one jump-scare-loud-music scene to the next. “OK, it’s Richie’s turn to get spooked by the old barnyard. Annnnd…. that’s a wrap. Quick, cut to Bill, it’s his turn to run away in the cemetary.”The real flaw, however, is how they ruined the terror that is Derry. IT was never really about the monsters; it’s established that IT is part of the town, and the town is a bad place. Whether it’s because of IT’s arrival (millennia) ago from space, or because the people are simply racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, awful xenophobes, doesn’t really matter: the true terror of IT was in the town’s willingness to turn a blind eye to – and tolerate – the horror committed by IT and by townspeople themselves.Part 1 barely touched on this insidious, country-fried nightmare that the book did an excellent job covering, instead opting to use its runtime and budget to cycle through meaningless FX-fueled jump scares.
It’s a great angle, too. The idea that you are being terrified/harmed as a child and the adults either don’t believe you or (even worse) don’t/can’t help you. It’s a nearly primordial fear that King exploits really well in It.
“Even more so than Finn Wolfhard did as a young Richie in Chapter One, Hader picks up the whole movie, puts it in his pocket, and walks away with it.”Not much of a feat since Wolfhard didn’t do that in the slightest. (Sophia Lillis, on the other hand…)
Shouldn’t it be ‘Despite a scene-stealing turn fro Bill Hader, It: Chapter Two sinks instead of floats’? ‘Floating’ just sounds odd, is all. Oh well. Carry on.
It looks not quite right, but I think a gerund usually follows the “instead of” preposition. I.e., “I walked to the store instead of taking the bus.” Still, there is something hinky about that headline. Maybe it has something to do with the tense? If you reverse the order, it sounds less bad. “Instead of floating, It: Chapter Two sinks.”
If you take out ‘sinks instead of’, it’s even worse. ‘Despite a scene-stealing turn from Bill Hader, It: Chapter Two floating.’Just weird, is all.
And if you take out all the words with an ‘e’, it becomes “A turn from Bill It Two sinks of floating”.We’re through the looking glass now, people.
And then Lenny falls through a hole in the floor.
Hey, I got a question, “Why is IT…so mean!?!?”
Even more so than Finn Wolfhard did as a young Richie in Chapter One, Hader picks up the whole movie, puts it in his pocket, and walks away with it.“Finn Wolfhard” is a wild way to spell “Jack Dylan Grazer” but okay. Disappointing to hear that the sequel warrants a C+, though the lack of scares was a problem with the first movie as well. The same jump scares paired with loud music kept happening, lessening the overall impact. In any case: actually, Gerald’s Game was the best Stephen King film adaptation of 2017.
I was going to say, in what Universe did Finn Wolfhard steal the film from Jack Dylan Grazer? That’s just nonsense. On a slightly weird note, the introduction to Grazer’s Wikipedia entry reads thus: Jack Dylan Grazer is an American actor. He has an unaccepted relationship with a Latin American (Mexican) girl from Nobre Abril Villanueva and will reprise his role the film’s 2019 sequel. What the fuck does that mean?
They both stole it.
Did they inevitably betray each other when it was time to split the loot?
Probably.
That someone went in and added an unauthorized edit to his page.
Yea, I walked into It happy to see a Stranger Things kid getting more work, and walked out thinking “oh wait maybe this kid isn’t very good.” And that was confirmed in ST season 3.
“Finn Wolfhard” is a wild way to spell “Jack Dylan Grazer” but okay. This. Grazer gives by far the best performance in Chapter One, and absolutely murders every scene he’s in. Beverly is clearly the anchor of the film as written, but Grazer provides 80% of the heart of that movie.
Gonna be honest – I don’t tend to get “scared” at movies very often in any case, so the fact that this one isn’t scary isn’t a dealbreaker for me at all. My daughter is much the same way, so I’m thinking we will really enjoy watching this together.
The art direction and production design are both top notch and full of tactile detail, and the entomologically inspired creature design nods both to King’s novel and such imaginative influences as Jan Švankmajer, the Brothers Quay, and Rob Bottin’s special effects work on John Carpenter’s The Thing.That’s enough for me to see It (Chapter II).
The first one was not scary either, I also wonder how they will handle the gangbang scene from the book?
Something is not quite right grammatically with that headline.
I really liked the first one while also not thinking it was particularly scary (which is similar to how I feel about my favorite horror movie franchise, Nightmare on Elm Street), so I’m still looking forward to seeing this one.
AV Club not like a movie?! WHHHAAAAA???!!
what the hell is with all these “uh actually It wasnt very good” crap around here. It was fucking great.
Oh… you must be new here, you poor dear. Here at the AVClub comments section, we retroactively adjust our past opinions to align with new information. Just look below any article about Louis CK to see how many pop culture nerds actually never thought he was a good comedian after they found out the guy who joked about being creepy, and then made 5 seasons of a show addressing his own creepiness, was a creep.
Right? For a mainstream movie I thought it was a fantastic adaptation of the novel. Could have used less constant comedy but other than that I loved it!
People are generally more likely to chime in with negative opinions on a (somewhat) negative review. In this case the second part receiving a worse review gives some agency to those who didn’t enjoy the first part. I was pretty pleasantly surprised by the child actors (I usually find them more miss than hit) but the movie itself was extremely lacking for me, especially as an adaptation.
Yeah I thought the first one, while not scary, was like a funhouse ride. Janky and colorful and loud and always moving, and at the end you’re happy you went on it. Well, at least I was. I think the projector scene was the platonic ideal of the movie’s style, which was “some spooky ideas married to a whole lot of CGI and noise and editing,” but it was a fun set piece!Chapter 2 has nothing remotely approaching that marriage of spectacle and creepitude. It keeps trying for it (and trying for it and trying for it) but the recipe’s off.
uh actually It wasnt very good
All I want to know is how metaphysical this thing gets. SPOILERS,I GUESS—–One of the things I HATED about the miniseries was how it turned what was basically a battle of will in an alternate dimension against an ancient and terrifying trans-cosmic presence into picking up a giant spider and throwing it into a hole. I genuinely liked most of IT: Chapter One, but it still bugged me that, in the end, it boiled down to beating up Pennywise with bats and crowbars. I just don’t understand why the people who make these adaptations are so uncomfortable with the climactic battles manifesting as anything other than physically beating down the monster, when what, in my opinion, actually makes IT more than your bog-standard monster story is the added element of metaphysic/conquering fear being more important than packing an actual punch.Sigh. Rant over. But if this movie gives us more of the same in that regard, I will be literally angry with rage.
I mean, let’s be real here. A 1990’s TV miniseries was never going to be able to do the ending to this book justice.
Sounds like it suffers from the same problems as the original miniseries and the book itself.The idea of a killer space creature, in the shape of a clown, terrorizing children is amazing. But once you make those kids grow up and try to explain what’s going on? It loses its edge immediately and Pennywise loses all sense of terror.Should’ve just reworked the entire film to be one, standalone film where the kids save the day rather than their adult versions.
Then that misses the whole point of the novel.
So many of King’s ideas work so well on paper because he knows how to set a scene better than anyone, and the way he describes things is just so *chef’s kiss* superb and really activates your imagination. He’s also a master at taking you into people’s minds as they process whatever’s happening to them. But something about seeing some of those same ideas on screen can seem… goofy. The time portal in a diner walk-in from 11/22/63 comes to mind.
The adult section (whether the novel, the TV movie, or apparently this) was always the weaker bit of IT. King is a good storyteller but I’ve found that the few times he’s focused on children have been his best.
Richie being queer isn’t “new information”. I know not everyone has read the book and a lot of it is subtext but it is pretty clear, particularly in (spoilers!) the part where they have to leave Eddie behind. I had a lot of gripes with the first one as an adaptation and I’m sure I will with part two as well, but at least they got Richie right by the sounds of things.
What the hell are you talking about. Loving a close friend doesn’t make you gay.
In 2019 it does. If two people of the same sex express any form of affection for each other, they’re “clearly representing a homosexual relationship”. See Frodo and Sam as one of the longest running examples people like to use for this.
While you could argue that people can read “too much” into minor interactions/characters’ sexualities, it’s fucking hilarious to me that you chose the gayest possible example to try and prove your point. Sam and Frodo are 100% in love with each other, sorry bro.
Yah I have to agree with you on that score.
Ritchie is in no way written as gay.
There’s a reason why “queer” is never uttered by everyday gay men, its chief targets as a slur. Enough already.
You reversed the change in Richie’s occupation. In the novel and miniseries, he was a stand-up comic. In Chapter Two, he’s been updated to a loudmouth radio host.
Richie is definitely a radio DJ in LA in the novel
He’s a radio host in the novel (he does Voices). In the miniseries he’s a stand-up comic.
What? He’s a stand up comedian in this movie.
No.
Oh God that Chinese restaurant scene. They should have cut that. Lame in the book and incredibly lame in the miniseries
One of my favourite things about the first film was going to see it with a friend who’s seven feet tall and doesn’t like horror movies – but he likes Stephen King, so I convinced him to come with me and he spent approximately 80% of the movie trying to compress his gigantic frame into a tiny cinema seat, covering his face and muttering “Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck”. Ahhh, memories! He’s moved away now, so I can’t force him to come to part 2, but I’d still like to see it. IT. True story!
I haven’t seen this yet but I was amused when I finally got to see the trailer for it the other day only to spot Jay Ryan, aka Jay Bunyan who had an infamously brief run on the Australian soap opera Neighbours 15 or so years back.In that show he played “wacky” Jack Scully, a former professional soccer player who moved in with his family in suburban Melbourne. He was also inexplicably a kiwi with a thick accent despite every other member of his family being Australian.His most famous storyline was when he developed a “clubbing addiction” in which he was always out dancing at night clubs (which were always represented as semi-empty dance floor with a pot plant behind the actors).Because of the time of night the show was on they weren’t’ allowed to say cocaine, hence a “clubbing addiction”.
Ha I remember that storyline during my university years! (Neighbours being the standard student house background viewing in the UK) – it took us forever to catch what was really being said by the characters and why (which considering we were all avid clubbers was an unnecessary amount of confusion)
I know he’s had some success after Neighbours (that Kiwi Go Girls show was genuinely great, and Beauty & the Beast had a surprisingly long run for a remake show that no one seemed to be aware of, even though Lana Lang was in it) but he’s always the Scully kid. I remember watching his ‘downward spiral’ and genuinely being excited to turn 18 and go clubbing 😀 I also miss Neighbours’ golden age. Delta, Steph Mac, Carla, Flick (kiss kiss), Harold’s entire family who died (why did I think Stingray was cute?) Glad to see Jay is getting some genuine work! He’s cute and Go Girls proved he could act.
Oh yeah for sure he’s one of the few people to come away from Neighbours and continue to act and work consistently. He was in a show called Fighting Season which I head was really good. It also had the absolutely amazing Kate Mulvany in it.
Oh I’ve never heard of Fighting Season, checking it out now! Other than Kylie and Delta, has anyone had massive success? A few married rich people, but other than that …
Guy Pearce, Margot Robbie, Russell Crowe all went big in the US while at an Australian level you’ve got people like Craig McLauchlan..
As an Australian, I can tell you I have not once thought about Craig McLachlan. I totally forgot about Margot and Guy, shame on me! Russell Crowe … didn’t we all agree he’s actually a Kiwi, not an Aussie, after he and Dani split?
You had me, I mean lost me, at “this 170 minute film”. Even King would think that too long.
Having seen it, I have a feeling King was pretty okay with it….
I enjoyed the first one in more of a Stranger Things way than an actual terrifying way. It was like a more intense Amblin’ flick. Which makes me nervous about this one considering the focus on adults.
Angel of the Morning? The Juice Newton version? That is just lazy filmmaking. Humorous use of that song belongs to Deadpool for at least a decade. The seventies and eighties were FULL of other cheesy songs they could have picked.
I do not appreciate how bad this review is from a spoiler standpoint. Not that I had high hopes, but when a review comes out ahead of a movie I don’t want to be told how different the ending is from the book or what the best scene is. But thanks.
Shocking. Can’t wait for It Chapter 3, because trilogy.
Read the book and very knowledgeable on IT but there are way too many movie spoilers in this review, cmon now!
Why are people expecting movies that are based off a book that was not scary, to be scary?IT is a plodding novel steeped in character study, bullies and the feel of a town when seen through the eyes of a child vs as an adult (and supernatural turtles, spiders and clowns). The book is never scary. The tensest moment in the whole book is when you realize who Mrs. Kersh was. The creepiest part is the town of Derry itself, which never shines through in any adaptation.Blood gurgling out of the sink, weird sex trains, masturbating bullies, King’s exhaustive elaboration in descriptions… I don’t see what was so scary. Never have.
I know its not going to be as good as the first movie but I’m still eager to see it. I mean, it can’t be remotely as terrible as the original far-too-long novel; Its just Nightmare on Elm Street with a dash of Lovecraft, a lot of baby boomer bullshit and a lot of passages that are just child pornography.
Hader’s charisma in the role is difficult to understateThose words… they do not mean what you think they mean. RIP Editing.
It’s poetry, man.
Honestly even the original IT kind of lost me with the adults. The first half was just so much better
Your review for Godzilla was terrible, and I’m willing to bet this is off mark, too.
“Even more so than Finn Wolfhard did as a young Richie in Chapter One”I find this baffling because to me Richie was easily the most annoying character/performance in chapter 1. I can’t recall ever *hating* a character as much as I hated Richie.
“Difficult to understate.” you mean overstate. Difficult to understate would mean..I don’t know what that would mean. I guess that he sucks.
I really loved the first It. The kids were good and not irritating (kids tend to irritate me), it was creepy but not scary, … IDK. I just liked it a lot and am kind of bummed by this review.
Hader does walk away with the movie, no argument there. I feel like the only adult Loser who really gets nothing interesting to do is Jay Ryan, a solid actor who has one good scene with Chastain but is otherwise reduced to The Nice Hot Guy. The kid actors were the best part of the first one but the flashbacks sometimes work and sometimes really don’t here. The clubhouse scene with Stan handing out the caps was sweet and sad. Ben and Eddie’s childhood scare scenes just felt lazy. Dropping the book’s whole theme of Derry and It feeding each other with fear and hatred but keeping scenes like the horrific assault on the couple feels off. In the book scenes like that or the night club fire were there to underline the town’s malignant relationship with It. Movie It is almost exclusively a child murdering shapeshifter.
I’ve never read the book, so I can only the judge the movies for what they were. I felt the first movie was good. The kid ensemble was great, the cinematography wonderfully evocative, the villain iconic and scary, and the story for the most part well rounded. The scares were perhaps delivered with a bit too much mathematical precision. Often it felt like, well 10 minutes have gone by, we need to throw in a jump scare or folks will get bored, instead of having them evolve organically from the plot. I enjoyed the movie even if I didn’t think it was a masterpiece. Part 2 I enjoyed less so. The adult actors are all perfectly cast but I felt like we only scraped the surface with some of them. Maybe it’s just a byproduct of living in the streaming era, where you can live with characters for ten, twelve hours, but it seemed like too much here was unexplored. The movie feels both rushed and too long somehow. I think the problem wasn’t so much the length, but that the runtime exhausted the director’s bag of tricks and so the film began to feel repetitive and predictable as it wore on, which slowly diminished the horror.
OK, I watched IT 2 last night and… that movie was off the rails! In a semi-good way. I actually would like to see a ~5.5 hour supercut of both movies’ timelines intertwined together (like the book is). I think there are enough flashbacks in the second one (which I actually liked btw, as opposed to many reviewers), to make it work! I liked the first part better but all in all I think IT 1 & 2 are a good and crazy watch. (Bill Hader kills, so does Jessica Chastain. James McAvoy is my fav!)
Other than a pretty terrible and unnecessary first 20minutes this is a good conclusion to this story. I never expect to be scared by this kind of movie anyway, or most any movies really, so I just enjoy the spectacle and design and such. I liked all the older actor versions but yes the younger kids were always the best part and were very underused here. I loved every set-piece with Pennywise visting the older characters individually. The end battle was mostly boring nothingness unfortunately. But ultimately who cares I enjoyed hanging out with all these characters again for a while.B+.
SPOILERS:…………When the spider-head scene started and someone said “you have got to be fucking kidding me”, I thought about leaving the cinema and going home to watch The Thing.I liked the first one a lot, but this one sucked. Way too long, boring, repetitive, with terrible CGI (the old lady demon’s face looked like Gollum, which was unintentionally hilarious), the only ones in the movie who gave a shit were Bill Hader and Bill Skarsgard. I actually don’t remember the last time James McAvoy was so bland. Jessica Chastain is a very good actress, but not here. The guy who played the adult Ben was terrible. There were a few funny scenes, but only because Bill Hader gave enough shit to make them good.What a colossal waste of time.
Do we think that Pennywise repeatedly slamming his head against the glass in the fun house was meant to symbolize the writers beating us over the head with the fact that McAvoy feels guilty for the death of his little brother?
I didn’t dislike the movie but I started noting every time someone runs at the screen. Jesus, that got old
Katie it was a baseball game, not football.
My biggest gripe with the film?They didn’t earn their “Beep-beep, Richie.”
Jessica Chastain just throws it out at Bill Hader as though that were a normal thing to say to someone and it’s delivered pretty flat.
Interesting. True it wasn’t as scary as part 1. But the characters are also adults now and they know what they are dealing with so it would make some sense that it isn’t as scary. I enjoyed it. I would probably give it a B if I had to give it a grade.
The total lack of consistency with Pennywise just makes the move and series kind of a dud for me. Like, I get there’s some quasi-idea that he feeds on fear I guess. But when he kills kids it seems like he’s trying to make them not scared before he eats them, so not really? Sometimes he’s just straight up murdering people, except for our main characters its just an endless series of escapable scary scenarios. So mostly he’s just playing the role of a cat in a dark corner waiting for the feckless jump scare, but is not really any kind of palpable or growing threat.Also, anyone else with long memories completely distracted by how Skarsgård is channeling Tobey Maguire’s impression of Screech from an old SNL sketch?http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/actors-studio/2861364
This movie is cursed by Muschietti’s love of stupid CGI. A great example is turning the little dog behind the door in that one scene into essentially zombie Scrappy-Doo. The Paul Bunyan statue was already animated-looking so it actually came off as the most realistic of the silly CGI sequences, with Bev headonfire being the dumbest. Bignakedlady looked like Gollum, could have benefitted by looking like the old lady from the scene. Hader was great but I got tired of the one-liners after a while. James McAvoy was surprisingly authority-less, the time when he is supposed to take command he instead runs off on his own. the character of Mike is so underserved he doesn’t even get a real horror sequence or a fucking token, his token isn’t from his parents’ burning apartment (Mustafa does an okay job, making Mike quirkier than you’d expect from a humble narrator). James Ransone is great but his Eddie is nothing like the kid Eddie (who must have been on uppers for his scenes here). Did they recast Eddie’s mom? Chastain comes out of it the best, and with the best sequences. the guy playing Ben is a nullity, apparently he shed pounds and personality; who knows if he can act in Australian but not in English, or if he’s just the new Sam Worthington. They should have opened with the little girl, not the gay bashing; they should have emphasized the people in town being cruel and stupid instead of just having them be NPCs to help the Losers. Overall a missed opportunity with a lot of stupid CGI.
I thought Chapter One was done about as well as it could be done. The problem with splitting this into Kid Half and Adult Half (same as the TV miniseries) is that the book is constantly ping-ponging back and forth between Kid and Adult stuff, to show the parallels between each. When you separate them, you end up with a Chapter Two that kind of just seems like a slightly reheated Chapter One.I couldn’t agree more about the terrible deployment of one-liners, and how they drastically undercut scary/tense moments.