If you’re one of Stephen King’s “constant readers,” as he calls us, you’ll know the horror master is prone to l꧒uring you in with supernatural scares, then revealing his human characters to be equally capable of rank monstrousness. This 🤪adaptation of one of his fattest novels succeeds admirably on that score, even if its overt boogeymen come up a bit short.
It’s the late ’80s in Derry, Maine, and little Georꦛgie (Jackson Robert Scott) floats his paper boat down a rainy street and right into a drain, where a sewer-dwelling clown who introduces himself as Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård) offers it back to hi🐽m.
Georgie’s subsequent disappearance brings together a gang of scrawny, brainy kids, led b🎀y Georgie’s stuttering older brother Bill (Jaeden Lieberher), to look for him — and f🐬ind out why so many other kids in their town are suddenly going missing.
Soon Pennywise is popping up all over town in various customized guises: a leper for the hypochondriac Eddie (Jack Dylan Grazer), a slab in a slaughterhouse for farm kid Mike (Chosen Jacobs), dead Georgie for Bill and, most poignant, a geyser of blood for Beverly (Sophi🍸a Lillis, working a strong Molly Ringwald vibe), who’s just gotten her first period.
Pennywise, the clown who feeds🔯 on fear: So freaky on the page, so tough to nail down on-screen! Skarsgård💟’s malevolent, grinning creep is a definite improvement on the hammy Tim Curry incarnation from the 1990 TV miniseries but never really comes into his own as the true stuff of nightmares. This could be, of course, because we are all simply oversaturated right now with the stuff of nightmares, be it “The Walking Dead” or the daily headlines.
Regardless, director Andy Muschietti (“Mama”) fails to heed the horror-movie rule that what isn’t shown is always scar🍸ier than what is, and since we meet Pennyw♓ise head-on within the first few minutes, it’s diminishing returns after that. But the literal ghouls here take a back seat to the subtler ones, which are really where “It” shines darkly.
The screenplay, co-written by Cary Fukunaga (director of the first “True Detective” season), gets pubescent-boy banter just right, littering dialogue with F-bombs and your-moms and generally making it a hugely enjoyable throwback to earlier King movies like “Stand by Me” (with Finn Wolfhard’s chatterbox Rich🌄ie a nice update on a young Corey Feldman).
Real ugliness,൲ the moments in this film that’lꦚl chill you, is delivered by flesh-and-blood bullies, like switchblade-toting psychopath Henry (Nicholas Hamilton) and his mean dimwit buddies, who linger after school to terrorize the chubby Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor), and Beverly’s leering father (Stephen Bogaert), who asks his daughter with a stomach-churning glint in his eye if she’s still his little girl.
Even a kid’s tremulous descent into a basement — one that’s devoid of clowns — will give you the shivers, largely thanks to King, who’s made a career of imbuing the darkness with all of our most personalized fears. End titles reveal that this is merely Chapter 1 of the a🦩uthor’s enormous tome, so there will presumably be more to come.
In a slightly ironic 🌠twist💎, you may walk out feeling “It” was a good-enough imitation of “Stranger Things” — the Netflix show whose creators, the Duffer brothers, made it after Warner Brothers wouldn’t give them a shot at this movie. Kudos on that last laugh, Duffers.