The 1990 version of this, with Tim Curry as Pennywise the killer clown, was a 3-hour miniseries. This new edition calls itself IT Chapter One, so at least one sequel can be franchised (hopefully just the one). There are echoes of other Stephen King adaptations in this nerve-shredding visit to Derry, Maine (regular King territory), where there's a summer of child abductions and murders every 27 years.
The whole movie is screened from the viewpoint of the kids, mostly the half-dozen plucky young teens who do battle with the monster in the late 1980s. They're a geeky bunch: one with glasses, one with a weight problem, one with a stammer, one with an over-protective mom. There's also a bunch of older bullies whom we remember from CARRIE (and GREASE and every other teen movie). And there is one girl, Beverley (Sophia Lillis, who has all the tomboy appeal that Jamie Lee Curtis brought to her early 'Scream Queen' roles); Beverley has a very creepy possessive single-parent dad. It seems weird that apart from glimpses of dysfunctional parents and teachers, there are no adults called in as the kids – on their own – tackle the new killer on the block.
As horrors go, this one is pretty scary without too much resort to evisceration. The clown monster Pennywise (Bill Skarsgard, not as camp as Tim Curry but pretty evil) has bunny teeth which early on we see opening into a CGI shark array worse than Alien.
This workmanlike version of IT (Chapter One) is faithful to the spirit of King's novel and is definitely up there with the better movies sourced from a book of his - with SHAWSHANK, MISERY, the original CARRIE and STAND BY ME still the front-runners (for me). Let's hope they make an outstanding job of Chapter Two.
