Ranking the movies I’ve seen in 2017 from best to worst. Some I have reviewed and some I have not. Click on the link to read the full review for each applicable movie.
Coming into this movie, I didn’t know a lot about the Steven King novel, the 1990 TV miniseries, or this new version, which I feel made the viewing experience much better. I knew there was a clown, I’ve seen the red balloon imagery before, and I knew it was in the horror genre. Beyond that, I was just going on the hype and sales of this movie.
[perfectpullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”#ff0000″ class=”” size=”28″]Skarsgård has what it takes to be nightmare fuel.[/perfectpullquote]
About a month ago, I signed up my wife and I for MoviePass, a service that allows you to see unlimited movies every month for a flat fee. This will be great for the fall season and hopefully into the future. Because of this, I will be trying to review every movie I see, so stay tuned! MoviePass is not giving me anything to write this, nor is anyone paying me anything.
It opens in the late 1980s with two brothers building a paper sailboat. The older brother Billy is clearly the babysitter in the family, and the younger brother clearly needs babysat. The younger brother, Georgie, has fears of the basement and when he’s forced to go down there nothing happens. This was a slow start for me, but then it immediately got better. See spoilers at the end for more.
The star of the show by far is Bill Skarsgård who played Pennywise (the clown). It was almost on par with Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight. You could see the legitimate terror in the face of the actors when they had scenes together. Skarsgård has what it takes to be nightmare fuel.
Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise
Throughout this movie I was distracted by trying to figure out the mechanics of how the villain worked and how he could be defeated. The writers very early on spoiled the fact that they were going to be making a sequel, and by the end of the movie, it was painfully obvious.
Overall this movie was very entertaining and kept me interested the whole 2 hours and 15 minutes. If the same production team is involved in the sequel, it should do very well too.
Who should watch this movie? If you like Stranger Things, It Follows, and 80s horror movies, you will definitely like It.
Who shouldn’t watch this movie? Fans of modern/terrible horror movies like Paranormal Activity. It has more of a story and character development and less jumpy scary stuff. Also, if you have a problem with clowns, teenagers swearing, or blood/guts, you should stay home.
Score
8 / 10 – Great movie to better enhance the currently cliche genre
*Spoilers*
Do not read below if you do not want to read any SPOILERS!
The entire movie we are constantly reminded that in 27 years, blah blah blah, the clown/It comes back. The movie takes place in 1989 which is 27 years from 2018. I wonder when the next movie will come out and take place… The opening scene where Georgie meets and later gets killed by Pennywise was my favorite. This scene created the baseline of fear for the clown and also showed that this movie was going to have no mercy, even on the youngest kids. Hopefully in the future they do a better job of explaining the history of this ‘It’. We got a couple of stories that the Ben character researched, which made me hope for a deeper history lesson, but alas that may come later. Since I’m not a It originator, that may have already been explained in the book or miniseries.
