Stephen Kings Es

I first saw this on a rented vhs in 1991. I still remember the shopkeeper telling me to rent the two cassette tapes as it was a two part series. Renting two vhs was a bit expensive those days but the film never made me regret shelling me the extra rupees. Revisited it recently on a dvd. Saw the remake with my son in a theater. The remake is really good. Coming back to the original, it has some nostalgic moments attached to it, the ones showing the kids play down by the river and the bike riding ones r memorable. Country life can b really fun for growing kids. The child actors in this film are marvelous. We easily are attached to them. The plot is about a group of misfit children who end up becoming lifelong friends and how they unite to deal with the horror affecting them. In my opinion it is a darker version of Stand By Me. Considering it was a made for TV as a mini series, it wasn't that gory n the special effects weren't that good. Also the pacing was a bit odd. The most striking thing about the film was Tim Curry's iconic, creepy performance as Pennywise, the murderous clown. The only movie which had dealt with creepy clowns before this was Salva's Clownhouse. Maybe Stephen King borrowed the clown thing from Victor Salva n Salva borrowed the concept of the thing coming back after 23/27 years in Jeepers Creepers from Stephen King.

The remake nailed it again with the child actors. The remake has superb cinematography, awesome acting n terrific direction. The fat boy's acting n facial expressions in the remake is spot on.

If you are of the King generation (lotsa books, bookstores, drugstores with books, tobacco stores with books, no computers or personal devices) then you probably have your own views on his place in the creative continuum.

My view is that his "early" works (including IT, THE STAND, SHINING) were his best. Wonderfully warped. And great fun to read.

That was the good news. The bad news is that, with rare exception (eg - SHINING) the B-grade studios that made easy money doing "tv movies" (you had to be there, otherwise you would not understand) generally snapped up his stuff and then did cheap, low-talent adaptations.

Wotta waste.

IT was one of King's more interesting works and this is one of the less awful adaptations. For insiders, most of the fun is in the first few scenes where one of the "characters" himself a writer explains that he has a job adapting his own work: "If anyone is going to mess it up, it may as well be me." The inside joke is that King himself was brought in as co-writer here because so many of the earlier TV adaptations were a disaster.

Again, one of the better ones. Lots of interesting faces here and there, including Ritter (an unappreciated dramatic talent) and Otoole looking radiant.

This is a very entertaining made for TV mini-series. It does a good job at jamming a book with more than 1000 pages into 2x90 minutes movie running time. The most important parts have been adopted, unnecessary fat was thrown out, little amandments have been made, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. The writers really tried to remain faithful to the novel and even mentioned side characters or story lines in short sentences for those who have read the book. The coolest thing, however, is that director Tommy Lee Wallace somehow managed to transfer that unique spirit of nostalgia, friendship and fear into his movie. Of course, the incredible cast deserves a lot of credit for that, too. Amazingly the child actors of part 1 upstage their adult companion pieces of part 2. The greatest performance of all, however, is given by Tim Curry, who really gives "It" a face, and a very scary one. He makes this movie what it is. In my opinion, it's the role of Curry's career, even outshining his part in "The Rocky Horror Picture Show".

Now for the bad sides of "It": as a made for TV project this movie obviously couldn't get too graphic and violent and that's a bit of a pity. Stephen King's book is awfully graphic and the movie would have been twice as scary if they had shown a bit more gore. Mostly Pennywise just appears and shows his sharp teeth and that gets lame after a while. The other big minus of this film is its ending. It has to be said that the ending in the book is so bizarre it's unlikely it could ever look good on celluloid. Still, those crappy special effects were just disappointing and made me (and everyone else I know) go: "Is that what I've been waiting for the last 3 hours? That is the big climax?"

Bottom line is that for a TV movie with such strict time limits "It" did a very good job at bringing this scary book to life. Nevertheless, I think the story should be retold properly and turned into a mini-series à la "Twin Peaks". The only problem is that it's going to be hard to find someone who can fill Tim Curry's giant clown shoes.

STAR RATING:*****Unmissable****Very Good***Okay**You Could Go Out For A Meal Instead*Avoid At All Costs

Adapted from the epic novella by Stephen King,It is set in the town of Derry,Maine,in 1960.A series of gruesome child killings are going on,which seem to replicate similar events that happen every 30 years in the town,rounded off by a big disaster that causes similar confusion and devastation.Seven young kids are drawn together over the course of the summer to face off against a psychotic bully named Henry Bowers and his gang,as well as coming face to face with the perpetrator of the horrific killings,a monster which generally takes the shape of a clown named Pennywise (Tim Curry).One day,they decide to go down in to the sewers and confront and kill It once and for all.They believe they have done this,only to get a call 30 years later informing them that this is not the case and that they must now abide by a promise they made as kids to return once again to do battle with It if it ever returned.Now,as mature adults instead of naive kids (and therefore finding it harder to believe) can they be as successful?

Very rarely do adaptations of King novels translate well to the screen,with only a handful of exceptions,and the producers of this two parter certainly had an even harder job on their hands turning a book of over 1000 pages in to a film adaptation.Under the circumstances,one might say they haven't done too bad a job,but they've had to edit out a lot of key sequences (and even characters) from the book,and as a result,they've ended up with a script that's had to leave out a lot of the original source material,and so you don't get the full effect of the book,which was a real door stopper of a book that took forever to read but engrossed you right to the end all the same.So as you might expect this film adaptation isn't as good as that but it's still an impressive, scary enough effort all things considered that spreads out an epic story engrossingly enough.

On the acting front,the child actors (with the exception of the one who played Bowers) fare better than the adult actors,with the exception,of course,of Tim Curry in terrifying form as Pennywise (one of the scariest characters in the history of cinema,never mind the fact he only ever appeared in a TV movie) and possibly Harry Anderson.Some of them are laughably bad in parts(especially the one playing the adult Bill when he tries to stutter,so sad when young Johnathon Brandis played him so well).Pennywise always gave me the creeps,possibly in a way no other horror movie character could,and nothing else is scarier in the film.But maybe scares aren't the main aim of the game here,this being a Stand By Me style King fable of friendship over-coming great evil against all odds.

Overall,this is a decent enough effort taking on the challenging task of turning an 1000+ page book into a feature adaptation,where it's easy to see where the cracks are showing but easy to appreciate for the things it gets right.***

That's what most of the other commentators say, and I can't disagree. Part 1 (or the first half, depending on which format you're seeing it in) is great: pitting some excellent child actors (including future star Seth Green of Buffy the Vampire Slayer) portraying some in-depth characters fighting against a demonic clown. The second half seems more like a "gee-wow - look who we got" self-indulgence at casting Anderson, Thomas, Reid and Ritter, with very little to make us care about these folks. The ending is also an incredible dumbed-down letdown, although in all fairness I don't think they could pull off King's ending, and most of the audience wouldn't understand it if they had tried. There are a few touching moments in the last half, and Tim Curry couldn't screw up no matter how bad the writing is, but generally the two mismatched halves make for a mediocre film when it could have been so much more.