IT
Fuck IT. Little bITch. Pretending like you're a standalone movie and then springing it right before the closing credits that you're just the first fucking chapter of . . . what? A two-parter? A trilogy? A never-ending American horror story?
Talk about hitting ol' Cinemavenger with a karmic nut shot. I laughed loudest and hardest at the groans of the unwashed, illiterate chowderheads who were completely surprised and totally pissed off by the cliffhanger ending of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. "Asstards," I scoffed. "How do you go see a flick and not know that it's part one of three?" Having never read Steven King's novel nor watched the 1990 miniseries version of IT, it is now I who am the asstard. Touche, universe.
The "it" in IT is a shapeshifting monster known as Pennywise (Bill "Yet Another" Skarsgard) who shows up in the small town of Derry, Maine every 27 years to kill a bunch of extras from a Pepperidge Farm commercial. It feeds on fear. And flesh. And can only be seen by certain kids. Because plot convenience.
When Pennywise starts chowing down in 1988, one of its first victims is six-year-old Georgie (Jackson Robert "E. Lee" Scott). Pennywise murders the fuck out of this cute little kid, and the audience in my theater laughed out loud. Seconds later the laughers gasped when a sheep got bolt-shot in the head at the local slaughterhouse. So, um, dead kid = funny, and dead sheep = traumatic? Fucking PETA savages.
Georgie's older brother, Billy (Jaeden "How Is This Even A Name" Lieberher), and his Goonies squad - Fatty New Kid (Jeremy Ray "Rip" Taylor), Smartass (Finn "Dingo" Wolfhard), Token (Chosen "One" Jacobs), Hypochondriac (Jack Dylan "Thomas" Grazer), Jew (Wyatt "Earp" Oleff) and Tits (Sophia Lillis "Fair") - band together to hunt down and kill Pennywise. That is when they're not avoiding their uniformly abusive and/or absent parents or dodging the local bully, Henry (Nicholas "$1,000 Per Ticket" Hamilton), who's equally psycho and nearly as dangerous as Pennywise ITself.
Pennywise, schmennywise. The scariest Cthulhu-tentacled, oozing, shrieking monster on display in IT is the Hollywood machine. Do you really think it's a coincidence that Netflix's Stranger Things took the world by storm with its kids vs. monster, 80s nostalgia formula less than a year before IT rides the same wave? Wolfhard even stars in both that show and this movie!
And are you fucking kidding me that IT is 135 minutes long? IT could've done the work in 90 or so, and that bullshit bloat costs IT a Cinemavenger finger.
Piece of shIT.
September 8, 2017