My Review from last October
Back from seeing Stephen King's IT which was not a very good movie. If you are into the loud, jump-out scares accompanied by crashing music, you might like this, but it got so repetitive. Person walks into spooky (room, house, library, bathroom, sewer pipe), music builds and builds, and then GOTCHA, with a big THING (usually a clown) jumping out and doing something. Every "scary" moment and scene is set up the same way, so we know what to expect, and knowing what to expect can be deadly for a horror film. (And did the haunted house have to look like a tacky Halloween decoration?) The story (was there really a story??) made absolutely no sense. Something about the signers of the town charter all disappearing, then a tragedy at an Easter celebration, then a factory explosion, then a watering hole burning down, and the news that Derry has the most disappearances of kids and it all happened every 27 years, blah, blah, blah. And all of this information expelled by the "kid researcher" (read: EXPOSITION CHARACTER). But none of it seems related to the clown, or the sewers, or the well, or anything else. And the real sad part is that the young actors playing the kids do not fare very well at all; very pedestrian and sometimes LAUGHABLE performances. (Yes, during one rather dramatic scene in the streets, the audience I was with seemed to be laughing at the actors --and it was well deserved.) But the worst part of it is that, for more than two hours, this horror movie made the biggest mistake a horror movie can possibly make; it simply was not scary. In fact, I was somewhat bored with the whole thing.
I will say that the people I saw it with seemed to enjoy it quite a bit.