tek's rating: ½

IT Chapter One (R)
Bloody Disgusting; Council of Geeks; IMDb; Rotten Tomatoes; Stephen King Wiki; TV Tropes; Warner Bros.; Wikipedia
streaming sites: Amazon; Google Play; iTunes; Max; Movies Anywhere; Vudu; YouTube

Caution: potential spoilers.

This is a 2017 adaptation of Stephen King's 1986 novel of the same name, which I haven't read. But I have seen the 1990 miniseries adaptation. This is actually the first of two movies that together adapt the book. (I'll put my reviews of both movies, which I watched over two nights in October 2022, on the same page.) Well, I couldn't get as into this movie as I wanted to, perhaps partly because of my mental issues like anxiety and executive dysfunction acting up. But also I just didn't find it that scary. And that may be because of watching it on a smallish TV instead of in a movie theater. I don't know. I did think it was a good movie, in a more academic than visceral way. But again, that was a failing of my own ability to feel, not the movie's fault. It certainly looked scary, even if I couldn't really feel it.

Anyway, it starts in October 1988, when a 12-year-old boy named Bill Denbrough makes a paper boat for his younger brother, Georgie, to play with out in the rain. The boat floats into a sewer drain, where it is recovered by Pennywise the Dancing Clown, who abducts (and presumably kills) Georgie. The movie then flashes forward to the next summer, when Bill is still obsessed with finding his brother. But he also finds time to hang out with his three friends, Richie Tozier, Eddie kaspbrak, and Stan Uris. (I don't feel like mentioning anything specific about their own plot points, except that Richie's jokes were pretty annoying. He's played by Finn Wolfhard, whom I know from Stranger Things, but I somehow failed to recognize him here.) The four of them get bullied by a guy named Henry Bowers and his friends, who also bully some other kids. Bill and the others soon befriend a new kid in town named Ben Hanscom, who has been studying the history of their town, Derry, Maine, and tragedies that have occurred there every 27 years. The current tragedy is a string of disappearances of kids like Georgie. They also befriend a girl named Beverly Marsh (Sophia Lillis) and a boy named Mike Hanlon. Aside from being bullied, all of the kids have problems in their lives. But the biggest problem becomes being tormented by Pennywise (otherwise known as "It"), and the frightening visions he creates. Finally, Bill decides they have to stand up against Pennywise and try to kill him, so he can't kill any more kids.

I'm not sure what else to say, except that both Ben and Bill developed romantic feelings for Beverly. I thought that if she was going to reciprocate feelings towards either one of them, it should be Ben, but it ends up being Bill. Not that it makes much difference by the end of the movie, because she has to move away. I feel like I am doing the movie a disservice by not saying more about it. I think in a lot of ways, its mundane horrors were scarier than the supernatural ones. But other than that, I can't think of anything to say.

tek's rating: ½

IT Chapter Two (R)
Bloody Disgusting; Dread Central; IMDb; Kindertrauma; Rotten Tomatoes; Stephen King Wiki; TV Tropes; Warner Bros.; Wikipedia
streaming sites: Amazon; Google Play; iTunes; Max; Movies Anywhere; Vudu; YouTube

This came out in 2019, two years after the first movie. But as I said before, I watched them both in 2022. I don't really think of this as a sequel, but a continuation, because the two movies tell one complete story. I was kind of prepared to like this one a bit less than the first movie, but I ended up liking it about the same amount, I think (possibly slightly more, but I'm not sure enough about that to actually give it a higher rating). I had the same issue of finding it more academically than viscerally scary, but I have no complaints about that.

It's set 27 years after the first movie, which I guess puts it in 2016. Mike is the only one of the kids who never left Derry, so he's the one who becomes aware of "It" starting to kill people again. He then calls the others, insisting that they fulfill an oath they all took at the end of the first movie to return if Pennywise ever returned. Except he doesn't actually mention Pennywise or the murders yet, because after leaving Derry, they all forgot about that. So, they all return, except Stanley, but I don't want to say what becomes of him. Of course they're all played by different actors now, Bev by Jessica Chastain, Bill by James McAvoy, Richie by Bill Hader, and Mike, Ben, and Eddie by actors who were unfamiliar to me. Also, there are numerous flashbacks to the summer of 1989, and more things that the kids went through that we hadn't seen in the first movie. That includes Henry Bowers, who was arrested for the murder of his father. In the present, Pennywise helps him escape from a mental hospital, so he can continue his work of trying to kill the main characters. Not that Pennywise needs an accomplice for that.

And... I'm really not sure what else to tell you. The remaining members of the Losers Club (a name I never mentioned before because it never seemed official to me, in the first movie) mostly want to leave Derry when they remember what really happened 27 years ago, but Mike convinces them to stay and try to kill Pennywise for good. Which is an even more dangerous endeavor than what they undertook in the first movie. But I don't want to go into specifics. Anyway, it's all reasonably engaging, I suppose. I'm definitely glad to have seen both movies. I liked them. I'm just sorry I couldn't get more enthusiastic about either of them.