It film review- critique of the 2017 film by Cody Leach

Full text transcript of the It film review:

Finally, a remake that we actually need. It tells a story of a group of young kids who are best friends, and while all the rest of the kids in the neighborhood seem to be getting picked off and go missing one by one, they realize that they are not only battling the trials and tribulations of growing up in the 80s, but they’re also battling a demonic clown named Pennywise. So like I said in the intro, people, this is a remake that we need, that it’s not a sentence that you hear very often. And honestly, it is the example that I have used for almost 10 to 15 years. Believe it or not, whenever somebody asks the question, what’s the movie that should be remade? What’s the movie that you want to see remade? What’s the movie that we need to be remade? I have always said Stephen King’s It needs a damn remake. Don’t get me wrong, I have a lot of nostalgic love for that original nineteen nineties TV mini series. I grew up with it. Pennywise, alongside Zelda from Pet Cemetery, are the only two characters in my life that have ever given me nightmares. But anybody, even if you’re the biggest fan of that 1990 miniseries, can totally acknowledge that thing is flawed as hell. So what’s the point of a remake in the first place? Is it just a cash in and get a quick buck out of a name that we all recognize? Unfortunately, 90 percent of the time that seems to be the case. But if you were really going into a remake with the right attitude, with the right purpose for a remake, you should take something that was tried once, wasn’t completely successful the first time, and you start to fix some of those things that didn’t work as some new elements, bring some new things into it of today’s age and give us something brand new that should be better, or at least just as good as the original.

And I’m here to tell you that luckily, after all my years of waiting, Stephen King’s It is that example. Now, don’t get me wrong, the movie is not perfect. I’ll get into that in a little bit. But I am so pleased that we finally have a version of this story that I think most people, an overwhelming amount of people are going to flock to. They’re going to really love it and it’s going to get us the sequel that we deserve. And finally, Penny Wise, the dancing clown, is got the respect that that character deserves or maybe the fear that that character deserves. One of those two, maybe both. So the positives of Stephen King’s it first and foremost, the biggest positive by far of this movie, totally knocked it out of the park is the Losers Club. All of these kids, these characters that you were following throughout this story while they are battling Pennywise the Clown, phenomenal. You’ll be hard pressed to find anybody that likes that nineteen nineties miniseries. That does not say unquestionably that the best part of that mini series is the part focusing on the kids. And luckily, that’s all you get in this movie. There’s no adults, there’s no kind of time jumping back and forth.

None of that. You get to see the Losers Club band together, meet each other, grow their friendship, grow the relationships, figure out what’s going on with Pennywise, figure out what’s going on in this town of Derry, the missing kids, all the death and the weird shit going on. And you were following them this entire story. And they are so entertaining. These kids have great chemistry with each other. All of them, with the exception of one which I’ll get into in a little bit, are really acted well. I mean, every single one of these characters, except for the one, is vastly improved on the kids of that nineteen nineties mini series. And some of those kids in that original miniseries were actually pretty damn good themselves. So kudos to these kids. These kids act like kids would act. They actually had a little bit of a potty mouth to them, but it’s not too much, which I was a little bit worried about. If they go hard are sometimes kids can be way over the top of how much they curse. Sounds like a strange criticism, but it does happen. They’re perfect in this. Whenever they throw out an F bomb or they start talking about things they shouldn’t be talking about. It’s for comedy gold and it totally feels natural. It’s so much good writing for these kids, good dialogue. And all these kids just feel natural. They don’t feel like they’re written for the screen. It really feels like they just followed these actors around. These young kids were playing these characters and just filmed them doing shit and they wrap a story around it.

They feel that natural. They have that much natural chemistry with each other. And I enjoyed them so much that when the credits finally rolled, I was sad more than anything else because I wasn’t going to be able to spend any more time with the Losers Club speaking on each one individually a little bit. You get like the leader of the group, basically build that dembrow. He’s kind of like the one who’s driving the story because his little brother George, who goes missing the very beginning of the movie, it’s kind of like Penny Wise, his first victim of the story. And that really is what drives the focus and drives kind of the motivation of the Losers Club because they’re trying to help Bill. Bill does not want to accept the fact that his brother’s dead. He still thinks he’s out there somewhere. And I really like that new spin on the story that Georgia wasn’t found as a dead body with an arm torn off. He was actually just missing. So the fact that his brother is that determined to go through all of this and search through debris and go through the history and figure out what’s going on, the sewer systems, just to figure out what happened to his little brother, bought a nice little human element to the story. And it gets pretty touching the few spots, honestly, to the point where especially if you’re an older brother, like I am oldest of five here, you’ll get a little bit choked up.

Boom! Come to.

The role of Beverly Marsh

Then you got Beverly Marsh, who has a much meatier role in this movie than she did in the mini series whenever they were focusing on the kids. I really liked her character in this. She was probably the one up until one character kind of started to steal the show that I was interested in the most just because her back story, as far as her kind of issues at home and her fears at home, which I won’t go into, really dug deep with me. And I was like, man, I really want to see how she’s going to overcome this, because that seemed like the most frightening and disturbing of any of these kids fears. So I really was into her aspect of the story, how her relationship with Bill and kind of the love triangle she has going on with Ben and Bill how all that was going to work out in the end. She was one of the highlights of the group for sure. Then you got Richie Towser, the guy who stole this entire movie. I’m not even going to lie. Everything that came out of this kid’s mouth was pure gold. Whoever the hell wrote this kid’s lines, you need to write dialogue more often because it was hilarious. You get the kid who carried over from stranger things who was really the only kid in this group that I recognized. So I was expecting the most out of him. And he delivered completely. Did not disappoint me at all. All of his lines, all of his relationships as he grows throughout this movie where he’s kind of the fast talking, you know, quick witted guy doesn’t really care.

He’s just there to make fun of everything. And he starts to get a lot more of kind of a human element to him throughout the movie, where he starts to kind of stand up and really go for it to help his friend Bill and kind of be the man that they didn’t realize he was underneath the big mouth. Love that character. And the last one I’m going to dive into not to shortchange the other kids in the group, but Eddie, I loved Eddie in this movie because the first movie, he is so weak and whiny and such a mama’s boy that it’s hard to really sympathize with that character, even though it’s not his fault that his mother basically puts him in a gigantic plastic bubble in this movie. He’s got much more of an attitude. He’s got much more of a quick wit. He pushes back against that a lot more. So I really identify with his character much more in this than I did in the nineteen nineties miniseries. That’s kind of a theme going out these Luser. That’s kind of a theme going throughout this loser’s club. If you haven’t noticed, even though I love that 1990s mini series, I’m telling you everything that they did as far as the Losers Club minus one character is so much better in this movie. Are you guys coming in

From square one? What’s a great one? It’s basically piss and shit. So I’m just telling you, he has a splash around millions of gallons of Darity. So what I’m. You serious. What? He doesn’t smell like. I got to listen. You have you ever heard of a staph infection so unsanitary you’re lonely. This is little xiaoming inside of a toilet bowl right now. You’re the reason, guys.

Oh, and did I mention how much I love the fact that they set this movie in the eighties? Let me just say it again. I love the eighties. Everything that they put into this that brings that eighties style from movie posters to Nightmare on Elm Street, Part five, the dream child playing in the theaters when they walk past that to the scene whenever they’re beating the shit out of Henry Bowers and their gang, throwing rocks at them and anthrax starts playing. Loved all of that now moving away from all those characters for a bit. Another huge aspect in this movie that was a big positive for me is the story, the way that they retold the story and retooled the story of it to make this definitively one solid movie that stands on its own. Even if there wasn’t going to be a sequel coming, which we all know, there is in one story, this focus completely on the kids, no flashbacks, no flash forwards, no interruptions. I thought they pulled off the story great in this. Not only is the story of it very timeless, just on its own. I mean, it’s a coming of age story in the setting, in the atmosphere of a horror movie, but also of facing off against a monster. You’ve got kids going against their fears and kind of standing up against bullies and standing up against this monster themes that will never really lose relevance. But I love the way that they kind of retooled it and modernized it a bit without bringing all the way into twenty seventeen. I mean, and the original movie, the kids were in like the 50s in the 60s. And this one the kids are in the eighties, which God I love the eighties. That’s another aspect I love. But bringing a little bit more modern not only makes the kids a little bit more accessible to kids nowadays and to audiences nowadays and make things a little bit more fast paced and a little bit more accessible when you watch it. But it just brings a new level to the story that tells you that this thing is just timeless.

Ronald. All right.

Now, I got to give credit where credit is due to the director, Andrew Machete. Now, this guy’s coming off a movie, Mama, that I was not a very big fan of. I didn’t think that movie was near as good as most people said it was. And I was a little bit nervous whenever they announced his name after Cary Fukunaga left this project, I was like, really the guy with that horrible butterfly movie. But I’m pleased to say people, he proved me wrong. He really prove that he is a good director. I think maybe there were studio elements that might have kept him from making the movie he wanted to make and mama. And luckily, it looks like it he got to execute his vision because from what I’m reading, even though Cary Fukunaga did amazing things with True Detective Season one, what I’m reading is that he wanted to take things much more into the sci fi range. He wanted to do a lot of mysticism. He wanted to go into kind of the trans dimensional stuff with everything. Andrew Machete wanted to keep it very grounded, very real, very palatable and very focused on the kids and their struggle, not all the sci fi elements. And that totally works to this movie’s advantage. He totally drove the story home. He really got great performances out of the kids who apparently loved this guy whenever they were around him. So you could tell they had fun making this movie, even though the aspect of it was horrifying. He had great camerawork, great shots, great set design and a really cool design for Pennywise. Now, speaking of Pennywise, let’s talk about the clown in the room.

We all go down here. This is probably the aspect of the movie that people are most interested in seeing. Bill Scar’s Guards’ new take on this character soon as those still images were posted, as soon as the first trailer came out, especially in the first time you actually get to hear his voice in the second trailer. That’s all anybody was wondering. Is he going to deliver? Is he going to wow Tim Curry’s pennywise into the frickin ground? And in my opinion, no, he does not. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still in my positives of the movie. This is not a negative. This is just a slight disappointment. Maybe my height was too high for this movie that I ended up with, way too high of an expectation for this character. But while I really respect the fact that Bill Skarsgard steak is completely different than Tim Curry’s, I think Tim Curry steak was much scarier for the time. Now, if you’ve never seen the 1990s mini series and you watch this movie and then go and watch the Tim Curry performance, you’re probably going to think I’m smoking crack. But trust me, if you watch that back in the 90s, especially when you were a kid that got to you, where the style of penny wise in this movie, I can guarantee you, if you took this movie in a time machine and brought it back and sat in front of me in the nineteen nineties and let me see both movies, I guarantee you I would still be more scared of Tim Curry than Bill Skarsgard.

I want to know

And there’s a few reasons for that, that I’ll get into without trying to spoil too much on one aspect, though, I will say I absolutely love the look of penny wise. I think that the look of penny wise in this movie is the best. I definitely prefer the Bill Skarsgard Penny Wise look to the Tim Curry penny wise, but where I don’t quite prefer him is one. There was way too much CGI, so many shots, so many scenes of penny wise for me personally lost the scare factor because of an overuse of CGI. And the CGI is not terrible in this movie. It’s actually pretty good, but it’s very noticeable and I don’t understand why they didn’t just use practical effects on some of the smaller things. I mean, just things as simple as his teeth. The teeth were scary as shit back in 1990. They don’t need to be computer generated. And I’m sorry, whenever his mouth opened up and all of those fangs came and you could tell that it was computer generated things on a natural face. It took me out of the scares a little bit. Hi, how Georgy? What a nice. The other aspect of his character, which I wasn’t a huge fan of, was kind of the way that he moves around, he has a very Manekin like swagger to him and doesn’t show it in the trailers. So it’s a little bit hard to describe unless you actually see it emotion in the movie. But whenever he’s going at these kids, whenever he’s moving around trying to be fast, it looks a little bit goofy. And he plays it almost like he’s goofy, like he’s trying to be funny. But he was. Now, maybe I’m totally full of shit, but I actually believe that this is the best way to describe the difference between the Bill Skarsgard Pennywise and the Tim Curry penny.

I feel like the Tim Curry penny wise is much scarier or much easily scorable to people who are not necessarily afraid of clowns. I think there is much more about that take that is just disturbing and scary and demented on a very basic accessible level that you don’t have to have a fear clowns to kind of have it hit you. Whereas the Bill Skarsgard Penny Wise is significantly scarier than this Penny wise from Tim Curry, if you are in fact afraid of clowns. All that goofiness and animated stuff that I don’t really care for, whereas I prefer the basic demented ness of Tim Curry and the jokes and the one liners, it’s going to freak people the fuck out if you’re afraid of clowns, because that’s kind of the clown shtick. Being goofy, being animated to me didn’t quite get there. Now, following that transition of the overuse of CGI and a little bit to an animated version of Pennywise. Let’s talk about the other negatives that I felt were in it mostly stand. Now, I’ve hinted at at this whole review, all of the Losers Club were phenomenal except for Stan. And it’s not just a small difference, a quality people. I thought stand was fucking horrible. Whatever kid, they got to play that role. It feels like he had a much larger part of this movie and they scaled it and hacked it down and took edits out and took most of his scenes out to scale him down to probably the least focused on character of this group, because the few scenes that are left in this movie, that kid is God awful. Maybe not this most. And that’s what we see.

I saw a leper who was like a walking infection, but you didn’t.

Because it isn’t real, none of this is. None of this makes any sense. There are like bad dreams, I don’t think so. I know the difference between a bad dream and real life. Not only is the acting really bad, but he just has no chemistry with anybody. You would not believe that these kids would be hanging out with this kid because he’s just a giant stick in the mud with no personality. And I did not enjoy any scene that focused on him, especially his fierce scenes. Now, there’s a theme without spoiling too much that throughout pretty much the first half of this movie, every single time that Pennywise goes after one of these kids, he kind of takes on the personification of whatever their fear is and stands. Fear is so bad and caked up with that more CGI shit that I hate that it is laughable. It is just like the crooked man in The Conjuring, too. As soon as I saw it, that’s the first thing I thought of. And I went, Oh, God, no. And part of the shame in that is that if you know the storyline, if you’ve seen the mini series, if you read the book, or if you just have a general knowledge of what these characters fates are, stands not really going to get a time to shine in the second movie whenever it comes around. So it’s a little bit of a shame that they kind of gave him the shit end of the stick in this first movie by casting him wrong and making his fear God awful.

And the only other very small negative that I have for this movie, which you should really take with a grain of salt, is that I didn’t find it to be all that scary. The trailers had me convinced that this might be one of those rare gem of a horror movies that honestly freaked me out when I watch it. And it wasn’t it was entertaining. It was creepy. There was a lot of creepy atmosphere. Everything about a horror movie that you want to be delivered, they deliver. But it didn’t really scare me. Now, keep in mind, I already said at the beginning of this video, only two characters out of the twenty seven years of movies that I have watched, hundreds of horror movies have ever honestly gotten to me. So I’m not the best person to ask if a movie is scary or not. But that’s it for my negatives, people. Big fan of this movie, big fan of this remake, big fan of the fact that we finally got a remake to a movie that we actually need a fucking remake to. What a concept. But to wrap all this up, guys, this is a movie that if you were a horror fan, you absolutely need to go and see, especially if you watch that nineteen nineties mini series and you loved it, even if you didn’t love it, if you thought there was so much that they did wrong in that one, I promise you there is so much in this that they do way better than that mini series that I still have a lot of nostalgic love for incredible chemistry and acting by all the kid actors in the Losers Club.

Great story aspects and great story twists that they bring in this to not only please old school fans, but give enough surprises that you don’t know everything that’s around every single corner. Really great direction by Andrew Machete. A lot of good decisions on his part, a lot of great camerawork and set design, a really good looking penny wise and a very interesting take on penny wise. That ultimately was a little bit disappointing to me because I was expecting him to be better than Tim Curry when for me personally, he didn’t quite reach that point. But again, very, very subjective, very divisive criticism that a lot of people probably aren’t going to agree with a little bit too much CGI. Unfortunately, that’s just a sign of the times we always going to shove CGI where it’s not needed and a really miscast and misused character by the name of Stan. But all of that put together. Guys recommend the hell out of Stephen King’s it. So if you were a fan of the nineteen nineties mini series, a fan of the classic Stephen King novel, or you don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about, I don’t know anything about Pennywise the Dancing Clown or anything named it. But you love horror movies. Get your ass up from this YouTube channel right now.

Go to the theaters, check this thing out, and when it comes to the shelves, go out and buy it. So what did you guys think of this new remake of Stephen King’s IT? Were there aspects of that nineteen nineties miniseries that you preferred or you feel like this remake completely blew that 1990’s movie out of the water? Do you prefer Bill Skarsgard, Penny Wise or Tim Currys Penny Wise to put all of your thoughts to Stephen King’s it down in the comment section below guys and we’ll talk about it and keep your eyes peeled because within the next week or so, hopefully I’m going to be reviewing the original 1998 mini series. I wanted to get it out before this, but I got a little bit busy with Hurricane Irma, who is on the coast coming for me. But I want to go see this movie first priority to put all your thoughts on it down in the comments section below. Guys, please, like this video hit that subscribe button if you’re not already a subscriber. If you want to check out some of my social media links, go ahead and click down below for Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and my on page, which is a great way to support this channel and get exclusive content for you if you decide to be a patron. Greatly appreciate anybody that decides to help me out there. And if you want to check out some more of my videos, you can check out a few more by clicking right over here.