It Chapter 1 Review
I remember Any Muschietti being in this spiritual club started by Guillermo Del Toro of competent Spanish speaking horror film directors (alongside J.A. Bayona) deserving of being financed for their productions. Of course his previous film, 2013’s Mama, never caught my fancy, despite having it star Jessica Chastain of The Help, Coriolanus, and Zero Dark Thirty fame. When I heard he was not only set to direct a new version of It, but that it was an improvement over the Tim Curry vehicle (and its camp), I did something I hadn’t done since a decade prior to its release: read the Stephen King source material in Spanish (like I did with The Mist). Notwithstanding the fact it was a real commitment to ingest all 1.5 grand pages of the book the movie itself was still something special. On one hand it was not your average horror movie in the sense that it feels more like a dark coming-of-age fantasy which had been the dominant theme of Mr. King’s works from Christine to Dr. Sleep. Of course since this was being adapted over three decades later not only was there going to be more CGI this time around but the source material’s setting was going to be bumped up from the 50s all the way to the 80s, which was when the book was written anyway. The good bits about the movie is the character development done between The Losers Club, the antagonist Henry Bowers along with his gang, and how it creates eerie visuals to help mix the real life horror with the one showcased by Pennywise. The bad are just sparing but may throw some off such as the jump scares, the way some of the death scenes go to gruesome lengths, or even how Pennywise can sometimes still be his own sort of campy (albeit darker than Tim Curry’s). Yet it’s definitely a good adaptation with twice the effort and care put this time around if this was only the first part.