IT (2017) *

Directed by:  Andy Muschietti

Starring:  Jaeden Lieberher, Sophia Lillis, Bill Skarsgard, Finn Wolfhard, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Nicholas Hamilton, Chosen Jacobs

Watching this movie is a thoroughly unpleasant experience.    You don't view the movie as much as survive it.    I felt I was subjected to this vile film.    IT is Stand By Me crossed with The Goonies and relentlessly bathed in blood.    I'm capitalizing IT to differentiate the movie title with the word "it".    It was bad enough I sat through the seemingly endless slog; now I have to make special concessions in my review.     

IT is the second film adaptation of a Stephen King novel released within the last month.    The Dark Tower was silly and dreadful.     IT is simply ugly and nasty, populated by kids we don't care much about because they aren't really given much personality.     Blood spurts or pours everywhere onscreen.    At one point, an entire bathroom is covered in crimson after a sink drain upchucks blood.    The adults in the film are either absent, negligent, uncaring, or abusive.    We are treading very much on Peanuts territory here, with the kids roaming the town almost unfettered and no parents to really answer to.

The film is creepy from the start, and not in a good horror film type of way.    Circa 1988: a young boy goes out into the rain with a small cardboard boat made by his big brother.    The boat accidentally floats into a sewer grate, where the evil Pennywise the Clown (Skarsgard) awaits.    Pennywise bites off the boy's arm and then drags him into the sewer.    The boy is missing and it seems many other children in the town of Derry, Maine go missing too.     IT is nothing if not gratuitous in its violence and gore.    Things are bad enough when the boy is kidnapped, did the arm have to be bitten off also?

Months pass.    The boy is still missing and the older brother teams up with some old friends and new ones who witness harrowing, evil visions to find out what is happening in the town.     They search the sewers and the library, but the plot detours so the kids can be kids for a while, including jumping off cliffs into a lake and discovering the joys of a first crush.    A tomboyish girl joins the quasi-Goonies (Lillis), and she is the most appealing of the bunch.     She reminds me of a younger Amy Adams.    There are echoes of Stand By Me (1986), another film based on a King work in which young boys spend a weekend hiking in search of a storied dead body, but they seem out of place here.    But soon, Pennywise shows up again doing his best Freddy Krueger impression and we are back to the ugliness at hand.

The search leads the group to a burned out old house that looked like a cross between the Myers residence from Halloween and the Norman Bates home in Psycho.    I wondered why such a house in an otherwise nice neighborhood would be allowed to remain standing and not razed.    So Pennywise can have a place to dwell, I guess.    Many scenes involve cheap scares and things that go bump in the night along with Pennywise, who can seemingly appear anywhere at any time and whose presence is signaled by ominous red balloons.

Some scenes don't connect to others.    Maybe they weren't tied together in the editing process, or some may only be understood by those who read the book.    I surely won't be watching the Director's Cut to find out.   The visuals are cheesy.   The film takes place in 1988-89, but it also feels like it was made in 1988-89.   Oh, and then there is the town bully who is terribly sadistic even for a movie town bully.    He beats up and terrorizes his victims with homicidal zeal and then gruesomely carves his initials into their torsos.    Maybe the guy saw Inglourious Basterds and took some pointers from Brad Pitt.     

Even the climactic scene in which the gang goes its separate ways involves a blood oath in which one kid slices the palm of all of the others and they hold hands.    The girl kisses the boy and then caresses his face with her gooey, bloody hand, leaving a smear of blood on the boy's face.    Is this supposed to be touching?     The characters deduce that Derry goes through such evil once every 27 years.    The closing credits refers to the movie as "IT: Chapter One".   Maybe they will take pity on us and subject us to Chapter Two 27 years from now.    This won't happen, of course, but I can dream, can't I?    Call me a tight ass or call me overly critical of a schlocky horror film, but please don't call me when IT: Chapter Two shows up.