IT [1990]

My first foray into the world of clown horror was to revisit a movie from my youth; the 1990 adaptation of Stephen King's It.  I was eleven or twelve at the time it was released.  I can't recall if I read the book or saw the movie first, but regardless, I remember it was a pretty big deal when this was broadcast.  To call this a movie is something of a misnomer; It is in fact a TV mini-series, which was broadcast in two one and a half hour instalments.  For those of you who don't want spoilers, stop reading now.  For those who have seen it, or don't care about such things: Here.  We.  Go!

  So where were we?  I was eleven.  Jumpers for goalposts.  It was on TV.
  Part 1 proved to be a great watch.  Tim Curry's Pennywise was an instant hit, and the next day, 'Hello, Georgie!' and 'We all float down here!' entered the vocabulary of my friends and I (I can pretend I had friends as a child if I want; this is my review).  It really did affect us.  We all connected and identified with the children, and while none of us were afraid of clowns, there was no denying the effectiveness of the central villain.

  The next night we eagerly sat down, noses two inches from the screen, and anticipated the delights and horrors of the concluding part.  And what horrors we got!  My memories of Part 2 amount to one thing; it was a tremendous let down.  It was all going so well until they served up that ending.  Through the intervening years, all that has stuck with me from Part 2 was that the giant spider looked shit, and that ultimately the whole thing was a crushing disappointment.

  On my return to It in 2011, I was carrying a lot of baggage.  I still had fond memories of what I liked in It, and I was genuinely looking forward to reacquainting myself with pretty much everything bar the climax.  We tend to have rose tinted memories of movies we loved from back in the day.  Oftentimes we revisit a movie we feel defined a period of our childhood, only to regret picking at the scab of memory.  Sometimes a scab comes away clean, and we are satisfied, but sometimes it clings on, stings and bleeds, and generally cause us a great deal of discomfort.  What is filled with magic through the eyes of a child, can be vomit inducing when looked on with adult eyes.

  Even when it first came out, part of me was aware that It was something born of television, and not of the movies.  The fact that Richard Thomas (John Boy from The Waltons) and John Ritter (who I was most familiar with from the awful Problem Child movies) seemed to automatically demote it for me on some level.
  Yet when I popped this in my DVD player two weeks ago, I was sucked in just as much as I had been in the past.

  The basic story of Part 1 is that a group of successful adults, who had been best friends as children thirty years before, receive a phone call out of the blue; It's back…  As each of them hang up the phone and the true horror of what this means dawns on them, we are presented with a flashback to them as children.  With each phone call, we get a glimpse of that summer they spent together, when friendships were formed, and lifelong bonds forged. 

  In my opinion, there are few writers who can capture adolescence with the verisimilitude of Stephen King, and, much like Stand By Me, It creates a wonderful sense of this time in our lives.  As a country boy myself, those early years before I discovered computer games were spent playing outdoors.  We would build hideouts, climb trees, explore abandoned houses (and smash all of their windows!), go for long cycles with nothing to eat but berries from roadside bushes and crab apples, or we would just hang out in sheds doing somersaults onto bales of hay and playing dead ducks.  The feel of this is captured wonderfully here, and in many ways I appreciate it more now than I did almost twenty years ago.  Holy shit, I just made myself feel very old!

  But nostalgia only goes so far, and at the end of the day, this also needs to be judged as a craft.  So how does It hold up as a viewing experience?  Remarkably well!  Sure, some of the staging is a little 'TV,' and the performances are uneven in places, but overall, this is a well made programme, and still stands up after all of these years.

  Pennywise is just as brilliant now as he was then.  In all of the killer clown movies I am about to watch, I can't imagine that any of them will top what Tim Curry achieves here.  He perfectly balances the sense of playfulness and menace that the role requires.  Even when he's trying to be your friend, you can sense his lurking malevolence.  Pennywise is a truly iconic creation, and rightly has his place with the best movie monsters.

  So far so good.  On to Part 2.  Much like the adults returning to confront their old fears, my own It awaited - that ending.  Even as a child, I hadn't been able to overlook (Shining reference, anyone?  No?  Fine.  Be like that.) how bad it was.  Now as we all know, kids are pretty stupid.  How much worse would the ending appear now that I'm a super intelligent (and modestly handsome) adult? 

  But overall, it is the lesser of the two halves.  Apart from Pennywise, what made Part 1 so enjoyable were the scenes with the children, and while there are some really nice moments in Part 2 - in particular when Bill and Mike fix up the bike and cycle around - a lot of the charm is lost.  The children were just better drawn as characters than their adult counterparts.

  It is in the final act that It really falls apart.  That giant fucking spider still ruins everything!  It isn't just that the spider looks terrible - it's like a rejected creature effect from The Fly II - it's that they make a massive error in judgement with the storytelling.

  In the book, it's true, they do fight a giant spider, but there is a load of messed up weirdness that leads up to it: The Ritual of Chüd, which, if I remember correctly, is something about biting a demons tongue and telling it riddles.  This would obviously be impossible to re-create on film.  It works in the novel because the book delves more into the characters' primal fears.  The fact that It is no longer in the guise of a clown doesn't matter.  Even though the shape has changed, we still identify with this new form as the same villain.  The face might be different, but the dread remains the same.

  But in a movie, once we've identified with a antagonist, we want to see a showdown with them.  When Pennywise is replaced with a giant spider, all of the sense of dread and excitement that has been building up for two and a half hours is deflated.  Where is the big confrontation with the evil clown?  We want to see Pennywise defeated, not some giant spider, that has nothing to do with anything.  Sure spiders are scary, but that is a generic, diffused fear, and not the focus here.  Our amazing clown villain is written off-screen and replaced with a soulless animatronic.  They don't even give it Tim Curry's voice!  There is nothing to connect this new monster with anything we have seen before.
  To do this in any film would ruin it.  Take any iconic villain - The Terminator, Freddie Krueger, Jason, Michael Myers, hummus -  and replace them with a giant spider in the final act, and you've got yourself a dud.  In being slavish to the source material, the filmmakers took what could have been a true classic, and made it a guilty pleasure.  It's a real shame.  You come away from It yearning for the movie that was within the grasp of the filmmakers, but unfortunately, it was beyond their reach.

And that's where we must leave It (oh come on; I had to use that gag at least once!).  I'm really glad to have rediscovered this movie, and it can take a proud place in my collection.  I love it despite it's flaws.  It really is a very entertaining watch, albeit one with caveats.  One last thing to note, eagle-eyed viewers, i.e. anyone watching with their eyes open, will notice that the young Richie is played by a prepubescent and very geeky looking Seth Green!

Next up is a non-clown related horror, which teaches a valuable lesson in lawnmower safety.