Review

Every thirty years or so a series of tragedies strikes the small Maine township of Derry; and no, we’re not talking remakes of Stephen King adaptations. Seems a monster hiding behind the disguise of Pennywise the Dancing Clown has the local kids on the menu. Everyone floats down in the sewers below Derry, and Pennywise is out to add to his pantry.

Going up against the monstrous clown are the Losers’ Club, who have banded together in the face of mounting harassment by Henry Bowers and his gang of JDs. Can seven young kids defeat ultimate evil? Well I guess so, as the main action takes place thirty years later when the grown up Losers’ Club members reform in Derry to see if they can finish the job they started when they were kids. One heck of a long movie ensues. Do you want a balloon?

It is of course derived from Stephen King’s magnum opus of the same name, which covered just about all the monsters of the writer’s formative years. The Mummy, the Wolfman, Rodan; you name it, King included it in his thousand-plus page book. Pennywise could take the guise of your worst nightmare, and, even more troublesome, adults can’t see a thing as they’re blinded to the magic or something. So how do you make a full length feature covering a thousand densely written pages? Besides maybe calling on Peter Jackson, you don’t. It was a three hour television mini series that sought to do justice to the source novel. Did it achieve its objective? Let’s check into the Derry Town Lodge and have a look.

First things first, I guess: the TV mini series isn’t a patch on King’s rollicking yarn of a novel, but then again few Directors are able to cope with Stephen King’s vivid imagination. Pen mightier than the sword, or in this case movie, hell yeah! Director Wallace is restricted to what he can do not only by the retarded television format, but also that even at three hours in length he doesn’t have a hope of filming every scene in King’s novel. What Wallace does is jettison whole chunks of the source material and go with by and largely just the clown himself. This doesn’t work as well, as one of the strengths of the novel is the potpourri of monsters King lays down. Wallace throws in a Wolfman, a Mummy, and, well, that’s all she wrote. Here the attempt is to throw the odd boo scene in and have Tim Curry ham it up like a Christmas dinner. Curry tries his best and delivers some chilling lines but is hampered in achieving anything meaningful scare-wise due to a laboured script which has him spouting off some pretty stupid dialogue. So yeah, the book is a whole lot better than the movie; not sure anyone could have visualised It the novel to be honest.

The book is a hell of a lot better but at lease we have Tim Curry trying to rock on the house down on a substandard script

One of the things that does work with Wallace’s approach is the flashbacks to thirty years ago when our leads were kids facing up to Pennywise for the first time. Seems that if you are a member of the Losers’ Club and you leave Derry, then you lose the memories you had of the monster and also your friends. On the bright side, you do tend to make a truck load of cash. Sounds like a decent trade-off to me; wonder if I had a monster in my childhood. Oh wait, I’m not making mountains of cash either … bummer! As each character starts to remember something that happened, we get a flashback to that memory; unfortunately for our adult cast, the kids playing the memory stuff generally turn in better performance then the “B” grade list of “stars”. Look out for a young Emily Perkins and Seth Green, who both handled themselves well. Wallace has the period stuff down pat and I was applauding those flashbacks; end of day they are a heck of a lot more interesting than the “current” stuff going down.

Also working well script-wise is some good characterisation; you won’t have any issues working out who’s who due to well-constructed mannerisms etc. Some of the major Hollywood scriptwriters should watch this mini series to see how it’s done.

Overall Wallace has his movie well-paced and it moves towards the resolution with no false steps, though regular King readers might have expected some more garnishing on their horror meal as the scenes unfold. Henry Bowers, for example, is not the force of chaos that he is in the novel, due to some pretty trite scenes thrown in to cover that aspect of Stephen King’s novel. Some more time should have been spent with Henry and his cronies and their victimisation of the various leads. The actual resolution itself is a complete let-down compared to what Wallace has going on during the majority of the movie, and is simply a cop out with some pretty nasty CGI tacked on. The computer stuff doesn’t add up in the modern era and I’m pretty sure wouldn’t have been cream of the crop stuff even back in 1990.

It brought together a pretty decent cast for television. Richard Thomas (Bill Denbrough) was perhaps the pick of the bunch, and if you ever wondered what happened to John Boy, well, he’s currently a top-selling horror novelist. Thomas delivers on the role of “Stuttering Bill” and I couldn’t fault the casting choice. John Ritter (Ben Hanscom) simply did another Ritter role, and his performance here was interchangeable with about everything else he has done. Sorry, going to cut this short as there’s a pretty big cast involved, including both the adult and kid actors. Annette O’Toole (Bev) was believable, but stealing the show was Tim Curry (Pennywise), who simply went over the top and looked like he was having a lot fun with another manic role. Curry eats this stuff for breakfast; an excellent performance given the movie requirements that are admittedly more cartoonish than pure horror.

T&A isn’t happening as this is mainstream free to air TV stuff.

Richard Bellis did a score that I can not remember having heard. Guess it worked in with what was going down on the screen as you notice either the great ones or the real bad ones. Would put it down as working but not overly memorable I guess.

Okay, quick review for a long-winded visualisation of a real long Steve King book. Guess I enjoyed the end product but kind of thought they had left too much out from the source novel. Tim Curry was great as Pennywise, but have to say that this is another adaptation of a King novel that didn’t translate all that well to the screen. The movie is slightly dated looking, but I enjoyed the younger cast on display, and it did keep me involved right up to the final resolution. Definitely not the worst Stephen King movie ever made but figure it’s not the best either.

For anyone wondering, yep, we are currently in a Stephen King slam down with a whole bunch of movies of the Writer’s various works being waded through. We’re hoping end of day to come up with the worst Stephen King movie ever made. There’s a bunch of pretenders to the title and some real howling at the moon stuff to come. Surprisingly, there are also some pretty decent movies in the mix, go figure!

I would actually recommend this one to anyone who hasn’t had the pleasure of catching It. For about 90% of the movie’s running time this is good tense stuff, but that other 10% is woefully inept. Regular King readers will no doubt have issues with what is left out, but if you haven’t read the novel then you are in for treat if only to have your fears about clowns confirmed. I would suggest you go and check out whether or not It floats your boat. Hey, my bad on the pun, last review of ’07 is my excuse.