'IT' A Review

IT is a horror film, an adaptation of the Stephen King novel of the same name. The film opens on a rainy day in 1988 Derry, Maine. Bill(Jaeden Lieberher) is sick but makes his little brother Georgie a boat to go play outside with. Georgie meets Pennywise the Clown(Bill Skarsgård) through the storm drain and then disappears. The following summer mysterious disappearances increase and Bill and his group of friends, the Losers Club, are plagued by horrific visions. At Bill's instance the Losers seek to discover and thwart the dark force infecting Derry.

Of the seven members of the Losers club all the actors give good performances but some better than others not because of a disparity of talent but material and screen time. Notably Jeremy Ray Taylor as Ben the overweight and more intuitve member, Sophia Lillis as Bev the only female member, Lieberher as the leader Bill on whom a lot of the heart of the film rests, and to a slightly lesser extent Finn Wolfhard as Richie who has a lot of the more outlandish lines and the majority of the comedic relief. The other members simply aren't given room to develop, character dimension sacrificed for pacing in an already sizable run time. Skarsgård is uniquely menacing as the titular villain but some of his nuance is undercut by a number of stereotypical CGI horror sequences.

Visually the film is compelling, with some evocative interpretations of famous scenes and settings from the source material however for each new and interesting image there is a mainstream style jump scare that seems out of place in this surreal and haunting story. This isn't about a haunted doll or house this is a story about an eternal demon that consumes fear and gluts itself every 27 years. And there are times when the film realizes this uniqueness and times when it doesn't.

A mostly successful adaptation of a modern horror classic, occasionally constrained by the yoke of contemporary horror.

Rent It.