Review of It (2017) by Moviemitch96 — 08 Sep 2017

This is a review from someone who's never read any of Stephen King's novels, as I've never really been a huge fan of him or his works. I also never got around to checking out the old TV adaptation from the 80s.

With that out of the way, I decided to check this out based on the hype and rave reviews surrounding it. And I must say that I'm probably in the minority when I say that I did not care for this film very much at all.

I didn't find it very scary at all, with all of the scare attempts coming off as ridiculously over-the-top to me, most of the child actors were all annoying as hell and almost never shut up, and the film felt too much like a Spielberg film, which isn't a compliment.

Besides the music style among other things that made it feel like a Spielberg film, there so many times in this film where it felt like a remake of the film 'Super 8' (which Spielberg executive produced, but he had nothing to do with this film btw,) only as more of a horror film instead.

Think about it. This film was EXACTLY like Super 8 in so many ways: In both films, kids are the main focus, with school getting out for summer, a girl hanging out with a group of boys, with the hero kid and the fat kid both having a crush on her, an unknown creature or thing killing people or causing people to disappear, the girl having an abusive or alcoholic dad, the girl stands up to the dad, but then gets abducted by the unknown creature/thing, the boys have to go rescue the girl underground/in the sewer, etc.

Sounds almost exactly like the movie 'Super 8' doesn't it!? Really the only thing I can think of to say that's positive is that Bill Skarsgard gave a pretty crazy and dedicated performance as Pennywise.

Other than that, this was a weakly executed, borderline carbon horror copy of 'Super 8', which was a much superior film with much less annoying child actors as well. When part 2 of this comes out, hopefully the story will be better told and have better acting to go with it.