If The Dark Tower was the underwhelming studio-trimmed Cliff’s Notes YA version of that Stephen King story, It is the R-rated unabridged directors-cut vision of this one.
In October of 1988, children begin to go missing in the sleepy town of Derry, Maine. The first is a little boy, Georgie Denbrough (Jackson Robert Scott), last seen chasing a paper boat down the street in the rain. Months later after more children disappear, Georgie’s older brother Bill (Jaeden Lieberher) clings to hope that his little brother is alive somewhere, working out how he might have slipped into the sewers and out of the town’s spillways. Even before enlisting the help of his friends — the Loser’s Club — to help look for clues, each of them were encountering waking nightmares of their worst fears brought to life… all pointing to a shadow-lurking clown calling itself Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård). It isn’t the first time this has happened, and It may not be the last.
Twenty-seven years (wink wink, nudge nudge) have passed since Tim Curry portrayed the sinister entity that terrorized both children and adults in a made-for-television adaptation of the Stephen King novel. Much had to be cut to get the story onto TV, and with a cinema system keen on reducing big-budget film concepts to the lowest common denominator to fill seats, the biggest fear was another generic PG-13 horror flick dressed up like a King novel but lacking any actual bite. That said, since the first teaser image of Bill Skarsgård’s turn as the clownish villain, fans of King and horror have held out hope that the evolved evil image was a hint of things to come. Does It live up to the hype, or should It have kept its head beneath the gray water for another three decades?
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