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Common sense media reviewers.

Terrifying evil clown movie based on Stephen King classic.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Teaming up with others can help you beat seemingly

The lead characters are troubled outcasts prone to

Most lead characters are White, except for Mike (p

Very scary stuff; children are in constant peril,

Young teens make sex-related jokes with terms like

Very strong language, much of it spoken by 13-year

Many empty beer bottles near an adult's chair in o

Parents need to know that It is a horror film based on Stephen King's 1986 novel, which was previously adapted into a 1990 TV miniseries. It's very scary, and things get pretty gory: characters are stabbed, impaled, and beaten with rocks and blunt objects. A boy's arm is bitten off, teens shoot guns (once at…

Positive Messages

Teaming up with others can help you beat seemingly impossible odds and achieve a common goal. But bullying is shown in different forms, from emotionally abusive parents to physically abusive teens -- and the ways it's dealt with sometimes involve violence.

Positive Role Models

The lead characters are troubled outcasts prone to iffy behavior or lying -- but they step up and are at their best when working as a team.

Diverse Representations

Most lead characters are White, except for Mike (played by Chosen Jacobs, who's Black). Bill's actor, Jaeden Martell, has a Korean grandmother, but he passes for White in the film. Main lead Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor) is larger than his peers and avoids weight-based stereotypes, characterized as being smart. (Everyone else in the cast is thin.) Though Beverly (Sophia Lillis) is the only girl among the group, she's resilient, courageous, and unafraid to face the clown. Bullying language includes "f--got" and, given the film's setting in 1989, there's mention of the AIDS epidemic (plus misinformation about how it's transmitted -- a character says someone got it by "touching a dirty pole on the subway").

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Very scary stuff; children are in constant peril, with a flat-out terrifying clown who threatens the main characters. Lots of bullying, including a scene in which a teenager carves a child's stomach with a knife, and another stabs a man in a very bloody scene. Teens bully a classmate by spreading rumors about how she's slept around. A bathroom is covered in blood, and characters spend a scene cleaning it up. A sheep is killed with a bolt gun. Rock throwing, with injuries. Broken arm. Clown stabbed through the face. Characters shoot guns, taking aim at a cat. Kicking, smashing in head with toilet tank lid. Kids beat the clown with many kinds of blunt objects. A father psychologically abuses his teen daughter -- rape is implied. The evil clown has supernatural powers, including shape-shifting and removing his own jaw.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Young teens make sex-related jokes with terms like "tickling your pickle," "period," "vagina," "birth control pills," "crabs," etc. Teens go swimming in their underwear. A kid tells another kid to "blow his dad." Two kids share a consensual kiss. Nonconsensual sex is also implied -- see Violence & Scariness for details.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Very strong language, much of it spoken by 13-year-olds, including "f--k," "motherf----r," "s--t," "bulls--t," "t-ts," "ass," "damn," "d--k," "f--got," "piss," "you suck," "my wang," "bitch," "retarded," plus "Jesus" (as an exclamation).

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Many empty beer bottles near an adult's chair in one scene. A girl steals cigarettes and later smokes a cigarette in a bathroom.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that It is a horror film based on Stephen King 's 1986 novel, which was previously adapted into a 1990 TV miniseries . It's very scary, and things get pretty gory: characters are stabbed, impaled, and beaten with rocks and blunt objects. A boy's arm is bitten off, teens shoot guns (once at a cat), and a sheep is killed with a bolt gun. There's lots of bullying, and it's implied that a father sexually abuses his teen daughter (who is also bullied by her classmates who spread rumors she's slept with many guys). Pennywise, the evil clown played by Bill Skarsgård , uses supernatural powers, including shape-shifting and removing his own jaw. Characters, including 13-year-olds, say "f--k," "s--t," "bitch," "f--got," and more. You can also expect a fair bit of sex-related talk among teens, though much of it is naïve and meant to be humorous. Two kids share a consensual kiss. Empty beer bottles are seen, and a girl steals a pack of cigarettes, later smoking one. Though the leads are mostly White boys, Mike (Chose Jacobs) is Black, Ben ( Jeremy Ray Taylor ) is larger than his thin peers and isn't defined by his weight, and Beverly ( Sophia Lillis ), the group's only female character, is resilient and courageous. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Based on 292 parent reviews

Get Ready to Scream: Why 'This' is the Perfect First Horror Movie

A good start before going with overuse of jump scares and poor direction, what's the story.

IT begins in 1988 in the town of Derry, Maine, where little Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott) goes outside in the rain to sail the toy boat that his older brother, Bill ( Jaeden Lieberher ), made for him. The boat goes down the drain. Looking into the sewer, Georgie encounters a scary clown called Pennywise ( Bill Skarsgård ) and disappears. The following summer, as school lets out, Bill and the other town outcasts -- including Beverly Marsh ( Sophia Lillis ) and loudmouth Richie Tozier ( Finn Wolfhard ) -- are beset by teenagers. They start to experience terrifying events of their own and notice that other kids in town are disappearing. Thanks to their new friend, Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor), the teens discover that the waves of evil things seem to happen in cycles of 27 years and that all of it leads back to a well in the basement of a creepy old house. Bill vows to stop whatever it is that killed his brother.

Is It Any Good?

Based on Stephen King's 1986 novel, this terrifying clown movie builds its fright from fear itself. In that respect, It is more aligned with The Goonies , Stand by Me , and Stranger Things than it is with slasher movies or jump scares. Director Andy Muschietti , whose disappointing horror movie Mama never would have indicated anything as good as It , keeps things simple by focusing on the bond between the outcast kids -- there are plenty of scenes that could have been taken right out of any summertime coming-of-age movie -- and by using a slick combination of practical and digital effects.

The result feels like it could have come right out of the 1980s. Few of the familiar, overused clich és of more recent horror movies are here, and, with its effective use of music, editing, set design, choice of angles, and overall rhythms, It generates honest-to-goodness tingles, rather than quick shocks. And Pennywise (a chilling Skarsgård) is an iconic character, based not on a simple fear of death but on something more primal and unexplainable, the thing nightmares are made from.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about It's violence . What's the difference between the violence committed by abusive parents and classmates and the movie's supernatural forces? What's the impact of media violence on kids ?

Clowns are often seen at the circus or children's parties. Why is the clown here so scary?

How are the teens who bully their peers depicted in the movie? What are some ways to deal with harassment? How would you deal with them?

How does this movie compare to the book? To the miniseries ?

Movie Details

• In theaters : September 8, 2017
• On DVD or streaming : January 9, 2018
• Cast : Bill Skarsgård , Finn Wolfhard , Jaeden Martell
• Director : Andres Muschietti
• Inclusion Information : Asian actors
• Studio : New Line Cinema
• Genre : Horror
• Topics : Book Characters , Monsters, Ghosts, and Vampires
• Run time : 135 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : violence/horror, bloody images, and for language
• Last updated : June 17, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, black writers week, it chapter two.

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Multiple “wow” moments permeate the landscape of “It Chapter Two” like so many ominous, red balloons floating across a New England summer sky.

Some will make you say “wow” for the sheer daring of their surrealism and the startlingly graphic nature of their execution. Others will make you say “wow” because they really do not work. Either way, director Andy Muschietti has absolutely gone for it with the sequel to his 2017 smash Stephen King adaptation, taking big swings and displaying both a muscularity and an elegance to his craft.

And given that his film stretches nearly three hours, he gets more than ample opportunity to show off all those tools. “It Chapter Two” can be a sprawling, unwieldy mess—overlong, overstuffed and full of frustrating detours—but its casting is so spot-on, its actors have such great chemistry and its monster effects are so deliriously ghoulish that the film keeps you hooked. You won’t check out entirely, but you will check your watch several times.

In adapting the second part of King’s nearly 1,200-page tome, returning writer Gary Dauberman is in a tricky spot: What to keep? What to cut? He does a bit of both while also incorporating moments from the first film as well as new scenes featuring the characters as kids to fill in some gaps. As in the original, “It Chapter Two” works best when the members of the self-proclaimed Losers Club are bouncing off each other, their banter infused with a sparkling mix of hormones, humor, insecurity and camaraderie. Unfortunately, Muschietti and Dauberman spend a lot of their time keeping their perfectly picked actors apart on individual adventures, which drags out the drama and slows down the momentum.

Just as the ending of the first film foreshadowed, though, the kids who escaped the villainous grasp of the evil clown Pennywise during the summer of 1989 have found themselves back in Derry, Maine—right on cue, 27 years later, to fight him again. They’d all gone their separate ways and carved out vastly different lives, and in introducing us to these characters as adults, Muschietti makes some gorgeous transitions that are smooth and inventive. But returning to their seemingly idyllic small town instantly revives their old rhythms and relationships.

Mike Hanlon ( Isaiah Mustafa as an adult, Chosen Jacobs as a child) is the only one of the bunch who stayed in Derry; he’s the self-styled historian and the one who makes the fateful phone calls to round up his old pals when Pennywise resurfaces. Bill ( James McAvoy / Jaeden Martell ) has gone on to become a novelist whose latest book is being adapted into a film, one of several meta bits scattered throughout. Beverly ( Jessica Chastain / Sophia Lillis ), who endured a controlling, abusive relationship with her father, is now in a controlling, abusive relationship with her husband. Richie ( Bill Hader / Finn Wolfhard ) is a hard-drinking, trash-talking stand-up comic who’s as acerbic as ever. (Hader’s performance is the highlight within this terrific ensemble as he shows off his perfect comic timing as well as his deep dramatic chops.) Eddie ( James Ransone / Jack Dylan Grazer ) remains a neurotic hypochondriac who’s married to a woman who looks and sounds an awful lot like his smothering mother. And Ben ( Jay Ryan / Jeremy Ray Taylor ), who was both the poet and the brains of the group, shed his baby fat and transformed himself into a hunky, wealthy architect. Other than that, his defining character trait is the secret crush he still has on Beverly nearly three decades later; it grows a bit tedious.

Perhaps the best scene in the whole film is the one in which they all reconnect for the first time over a boisterous, boozy dinner at a Chinese restaurant. They spin the lazy Susan, down shots of liquor, tease each other mercilessly and find it’s as if no time at all has passed—even though the memories of the trauma they shared are hazy at best. “It Chapter Two” is at its strongest when it explores the lure of nostalgia, not merely through pop culture references like “ The Lost Boys ” and Cameo’s “Word Up,” but also in the cosmic way it can yank you right back to being the person you were long ago and never thought you’d be again. That unsure, evolving 13-year-old remains inside all of us, no matter where we go or what we do.

Pennywise, however, has stayed the same all this time—and Bill Skarsgård ’s deeply creepy presence is sorely missed when he’s off screen. With a performance that’s as physical as it is verbal, he consistently manages to find that sweet spot between being terrifying and hilarious. He’s created an iconic horror villain for the ages. But the rules seem to be ever changing as to what Pennywise can achieve with his supernatural abilities. He knows what scares these characters, even as adults, which often manifests itself in strange, vivid ways. It’s the stuff of nightmares, even when they’re wide awake in broad daylight. But his omniscience and omnipresence tend to vacillate, and the collaborative power that ultimately challenges him isn’t too different from what we saw in the climax of the first movie.

First, though, the members of the Losers Club must spread out across town and find totems from their youth as part of a ritual to purge Pennywise from existence; they do it at Mike’s insistence, part of the Native American subplot that also exists in the source material. It’s absurd and it’s a distraction; excising this element of the story would have made the film as a whole leaner and stronger. But while separating the characters significantly lengthens the running time, it also results in individual moments of insane terror, most notably the expertly staged and paced scene in which Beverly revisits her childhood apartment. What she finds there is one of those “wow” moments—you’ll laugh out loud in hopes of alleviating some of the excruciating suspense.

Eventually, though, you’ll also come to realize that Pennywise gets a little repetitive with the frights he inflicts upon his victims. They’re of a few varieties: They’re staggering, slurping zombies, or they’re somehow spider-related, or they involve gallons of water or blood. (Henry Bowers [ Teach Grant / Nicholas Hamilton ], the mulleted bully from the first film, also returns to do his cruel bidding in a way that feels contrived and superfluous.) But as “It Chapter Two” shows us, not only can you go home again—you sorta have to. 

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film Credits

It Chapter Two (2019)

169 minutes

James McAvoy as Bill Denbrough

Jessica Chastain as Beverly Marsh

Jay Ryan as Ben Hanscom

Bill Hader as Richie Tozier

Isaiah Mustafa as Mike Hanlon

James Ransone as Eddie Kaspbrak

Andy Bean as Stanley Uris

Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise

Teach Grant as Henry Bowers

Jess Weixler as Audra Phillips

Jaeden Martell as Young Bill Denbrough

Sophia Lillis as Young Beverly Marsh

Jeremy Ray Taylor as Young Ben Hanscom

Finn Wolfhard as Young Richie Tozier

Chosen Jacobs as Young Mike Hanlon

Jack Dylan Grazer as Young Eddie Kaspbrak

Wyatt Oleff as Young Stanley Uris

• Andy Muschietti
• Gary Dauberman
• Stephen King

Director of Photography

• Checco Varese
• Jason Ballantine

Original Music Composer

• Benjamin Wallfisch

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Stephen King's IT Review

The most stephen king movie ever..

Stephen King's It: Film Stills and Posters

IT may not be the best Stephen King movie (even though it comes impressively close), but it’s probably the MOST Stephen King movie. Director Andy Muschietti evokes the horror author’s effortless melodrama and in-your-face psychological torments simultaneously, because he seems to understand that these sensibilities bring out the best and, by definition, the worst in one another. Nightmares are scarier when they emerge from happy dreams, and happy endings mean a heck of a lot more when unthinkable horror precedes them. And of course, everything is creepier with a scary clown in it.

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It Review: An Excellent Coming-of-Age Movie, Until That Clown Gets in the Way

The most appealing parts of Andy Muschietti’s splashy It channel another classic Stephen King adaptation—but not the 1990 miniseries version of It , featuring an iconic Tim Curry performance that sent scores of terrified children straight to the therapist’s couch (according to schoolyard legend, anyway).

No, It is at its best when the titular shape-shifting demon—which, as if you weren’t aware, most often takes the form of Pennywise the Dancing Clown—is nowhere to be found. The first It was anchored by Curry’s gleeful menace; the second focuses on the bond formed between a group of young misfits one crazy summer. There’s more than a whiff of Stand by Me about the newer movie, not only because of thematic similarities between that film’s source material and It, but also thanks to Muschietti’s killer cast—a deft collection of teenaged talents that seem destined to break big à la Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman, and Jerry O’Connell.

When It ’s seven-core performers— Jaeden Lieberher, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Sophia Lillis, Finn Wolfhard, Wyatt Oleff, Chosen Jacobs, and Jack Dylan Grazer —are arguing about the merits of loogie mass vs. distance or bashfully exploring their first flashes of puppy love, It is a delight. Every member of the gang that comes to call themselves the Losers’ Club is natural and charismatic, especially the luminous Lillis as Beverly, the only girl in the group, and Wolfhard, whose wisecracking Richie easily walks away with the movie. Their ensemble scenes display the same sort of easy camaraderie that made Stranger Things (which also stars Wolfhard, and was heavily influenced by the original It ) such a hit for Netflix last summer. Sure, the movie’s R rating allows Muschietti to get gorier than the 1990 It —but more importantly, it gives the kids the freedom to say “fuck,” not gratuitously but with a studied nonchalance familiar to anyone who’s ever been 13.

Alas, It isn’t just a coming-of-age story; it’s also a movie about a killer clown. And while its revamped Pennywise, played here by Bill Skarsgård (brother-of- Alexander, son-of- Stellan ), has his moments, his scenes often feel more distracting than essential.

#cneembed: script/video/5981d176be10344717000000.js?muted=1 ||||||

Though King’s novel crosscuts between its characters as children in 1958 and as adults in 1985, the new movie takes advantage of current nostalgia trends by transporting the kids to 1989 and nixing material about the grown-up Losers entirely. (That’s all coming in the sequel .) The shifting timeline doesn’t affect the Losers’ dynamic, but it does force It, which can take the form of the thing that scares each child most, to reach into a new bag of tricks.

When he’s not japing as Pennywise, King’s It loves to impersonate old Universal creatures like Frankenstein’s monster, the Mummy, and the Wolfman. Because those beasts don’t hit the same beats for modern audiences, Muschietti’s It opts instead to transform into a series of grotesque computer-generated spectacles, which are usually punctuated by a wordless appearance from Pennywise himself. While the film sometimes uses suspense as a tool, it more often dives head-first into dramatizing King’s grislier flights of fancy, from a child’s arm being ripped off to a fountain of blood that puts the bucket in Carrie to shame.

Though the filmmakers claim to have relied on practical effects whenever possible, there’s still a C.G.I. slickness here that robs It itself of its urgency. Tim Curry’s version of the clown was all chalky greasepaint and bloodshot eyes and horrific yellow teeth—a creature of fantasy, sure, but a tangible one. By contrast, Skarsgård’s preternaturally baby-smooth face and generic horror-movie growl fail to make much of a lasting impression, especially because he has fewer lines than Curry did. And though some of the film’s bigger set pieces show the same irreverent wit as the Losers’ ensemble scenes—at one point, two of the kids are faced with a set of doors reading “SCARY,” “VERY SCARY,” and “NOT SCARY AT ALL”—those overlong sequences are often dragged down by clichés, all swelling music cues and jump scares and shots of a child walking slowly toward something he should logically be running away from.

It’s the human monsters in It that end up leaving a more permanent mark, from the adults who consciously ignore the strange and violent happenings in their sleepy Maine town to the father who sexually assaults his child—though the movie decides to soften the mortal bullies who also torment the Losers. (There are a lot of people tormenting the Losers!) In the book and miniseries, those cartoonish thugs are virulently racist and anti-Semitic; in the movie, they’re just sadistic jerks. While the impulse to avoid using racially charged language is understandable, doing so also gives Jacobs’s Mike, the only Loser of color, even less of an arc than the he has in the flashback half of the book—especially since his role as the gang’s chief expositor has also been handed off to another character. Together, these decisions have the unfortunate effect of making Mike the least well-defined member of the group; perhaps the sequel will flesh him out a bit more.

If It were just a flashy horror spectacle, issues like that—and the film’s treatment of Beverly, whose main personality trait is the desire she sparks in others—wouldn’t stick out quite as much. But like King’s best work, the movie wants to be greater than the sum of some cheap scares. Often, thanks to its strong cast and quieter moments, It succeeds in this goal—but there’d be a lot more time for character development if the film didn’t feature quite so many long, frenetic scenes of animated mayhem. As a seminal entry in the analog “kids on bikes” genre , King’s It successfully married real terror (and a magic turtle!) with a lovely meditation on innocence lost. The new It almost makes you wish for a story that ditched the clown for a less literal metaphor.

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In the summer of 1989, a group of bullied kids band together to destroy a shape-shifting monster, which disguises itself as a clown and preys on the children of Derry, their small Maine town... Read all In the summer of 1989, a group of bullied kids band together to destroy a shape-shifting monster, which disguises itself as a clown and preys on the children of Derry, their small Maine town. In the summer of 1989, a group of bullied kids band together to destroy a shape-shifting monster, which disguises itself as a clown and preys on the children of Derry, their small Maine town.

• Andy Muschietti
• Chase Palmer
• Cary Joji Fukunaga
• Gary Dauberman
• Bill Skarsgård
• Jaeden Martell
• Finn Wolfhard
• 2.1K User reviews
• 620 Critic reviews
• 69 Metascore
• 10 wins & 49 nominations

• Bill Denbrough
• (as Jaeden Lieberher)

• Richie Tozier

• Beverly Marsh

• Ben Hanscom

• Mike Hanlon

• Eddie Kaspbrak

• Stanley Uris

• Henry Bowers

• Belch Huggins

• Victor Criss

• Patrick Hockstetter

• Georgie Denbrough

• Officer Bowers

• Zach Denbrough

• Sharon Denbrough

• Sonia Kaspbrak
• (as Molly Jane Atkinson)
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia Jack Dylan Grazer (Eddie) was the first one out of all the kids to work with Bill Skarsgård (Pennywise). During their scene, Grazer would cry and gag while Skarsgård was right in his face yelling and drooling. Skarsgård was genuinely concerned for Grazer and after the scene ended, asked him if he was okay. Grazer looked right at him and said, "Love what you're doing with the character!" Skarsgård was left confused and impressed at Grazer's attitude, calling the child actors "little professionals."
• Goofs (at around 28 mins) Derry, Maine is in the USA, however a war memorial contains the line "for king and country", revealing the filming location in Canada.

Richie Tozier : I hear the list is longer than my wang.

Stanley Uris : That's not saying much.

• Crazy credits The film title "It" appears at the start as the camera zooms out of a Derry sewer tunnel. The title appears again in the closing credits with "Chapter One" added to it.
• Connections Featured in Blackcatloner: The Last Week of Work Workout (2017)
• Soundtracks Love Removal Machine Written by Ian Astbury and Billy Duffy (as William Duffy) Performed by The Cult Courtesy of Beggars Banquet Records Ltd.

User reviews 2.1K

• achyutaghosh
• Sep 8, 2017
• How long is It? Powered by Alexa
• Was It an extraterrestrial?
• Is this a re-imagining of the TV miniseries?
• Who wrote the script?
• September 8, 2017 (United States)
• United States
• Official Facebook
• Official Instagram
• It: Chapter One
• Bangor, Maine, USA (on location)
• New Line Cinema
• RatPac-Dune Entertainment
• Vertigo Entertainment
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $35,000,000 (estimated)
• $328,874,981
• $123,403,419
• Sep 10, 2017
• $704,242,888

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 15 minutes
• Dolby Digital
• Dolby Atmos
• Dolby Surround 7.1

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‘It’ review

'it' hits a high note in horror, teaching an old clown terrifying new tricks.

Pennywise the Clown is back to terrorize a new generation of audiences in director Andy Muschietti’s adaptation of Stephen King’s popular horror novel, so read on for our full  It review.

Adaptations of Stephen King’s work are all the rage these days, but for every hit movie or television project spawned from the prolific author’s work, there have been more than a few misses .

On the surface, director Andy Muschietti’s big-screen translation of  It  has its work cut out for it. Based on King’s 1986 story about a group of outcasts battling an ancient evil in their Maine hometown, first as children then again as adults,  It follows in the footsteps of a popular 1990 television miniseries that famously cast Tim Curry as its terrifying villain, Pennywise the Clown.

As if filling those clown-sized shoes wasn’t enough of a challenge, the big-screen version of  It also has to find success as a two-part tale, condensing King’s generation-spanning saga into a pair of two-hour features. It’s a strategy that relies on the first installment being successful enough to justify telling the second half of the story, and one that has had mixed success in Hollywood lately.

It succeeds, and ranks among the best Stephen King adaptations (so far).

Despite all of those elements working against it, though,  It succeeds — and ranks among the best King adaptations (so far).

With the first chapter of  It set during the main characters’ early years, the film is led by a talented cast of young actors. Rising stars Jaeden Lieberher ( Midnight Special ,  The Book of Henry ) and Finn Wolfhard ( Stranger Things ) are joined by lesser-known actors Jeremy Ray Taylor, Sophia Lillis, Wyatt Oleff, and Chosen Jacobs in the story’s group of misfits who lovingly dub themselves “The Losers Club.”

The chemistry between the young actors is impressive, and while it doesn’t match the same coming-of-age authenticity that ran through films like The Goonies or  Stand By Me  — another adaptation of King’s work — there’s plenty of heart connecting the young characters in  It . Where the 1990 miniseries seemed to short-change the young characters’ side of the story in favor of exploring their adventure as adults, Muschietti’s  It is in no such hurry, and wisely gives the characters room to grow both individually and as a close-knit, loyal circle of friends.

Lieberher and Lillis are both particularly effective in their roles, and the characters they portray have a sense of depth that makes the terrors they face resonate beyond the typical monster moments and jump scares. It’s clear that Muschietti puts a lot of trust in his young cast, and it pays off in their performances.

Occupying the film’s most iconic role,  Hemlock Grove actor Bill Skarsgård manages to both meet the high expectations for the Pennywise role set by Curry and put his own, nightmare-fueling spin on the character.

Where Curry’s version of the clown was often a comical character when it wasn’t dispensing frights, opting to save its most inhuman moments for climactic points in the story, Skarsgård’s Pennywise seems only mildly interested in passing for human. There’s a monstrous, alien tone to the film’s version of Pennywise that feels entirely different from Curry’s interpretation of the character. The villain is almost completely disconnected from humanity, and terrifying in fresh new ways.

This key difference between the two versions of Pennywise is significant, because it effectively minimizes the creepy, coulrophobic terror of Skarsgård’s performance in favor of more traditional, gore-and-fangs creature scares. Whether the frightening elements in this version of  It achieve the desired results will likely depend on which sort of scares audience members are more susceptible to these days.

Anyone familiar with Muschietti’s 2013 horror film  Mama , which first earned him the attention of Hollywood, will likely find some similarity in tone and visual effects during some of the darker moments in  It . Muschietti does his best work in the dark, and the big-screen version of  It spends noticeably more time in the shadows than its television counterpart, and revels in nightmarish imagery. Surprisingly, the film also feels comfortable during daytime moments. That’s likely as much a credit to the cast as it is the person behind the camera.

Given the two-part format for  It , it’s reasonable to expect that the first film would conclude on an unsatisfying, open-ended note, but Muschietti does an impressive job of making It feel like a self-contained story. Muschietti and the film’s screenwriting team had a difficult balancing act to pull off with this first film, but they manage to leave the door open narratively while giving the audience a sense of closure.

It doesn’t rank among the more surreal or philosophical adaptations of King’s work (a la The Shining or  The Shawshank Redemption ), but Muschietti brings the source material to the screen in a way that preserves both its heart and its terror. It mines elements of King’s story that the 1990 miniseries glossed over, and benefits from a cast that’s talented and creative enough to bring those aspects of the tale to life.

The first chapter of  It is strong enough to stand on its own, but we’re glad that there’s more story to tell.

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Channing Tatum's Poorly-Reviewed Historical Movie Gets Near Perfect Accuracy Score From Expert

10 best iron man villain quotes in the mcu, i'm really curious how denzel washington will replace his $573 million franchise, as a coming of age parable, it succeeds at being both horrifying and emotionally-resonant, even while adapting only half of king's original story..

Adapted from the best-selling Stephen King novel of the same name (first published in 1986), the movie version of  IT spent a number of years in development under the watchful eye of filmmaker Cary Fukunaga ( Beasts of No Nation ) before ultimately making it to the big screen with Andy Muschietti (the director of  Mama ) at the helm. The change in directors was no doubt of concern to fans of both King's source material and the horror/thriller author's body of work in general, given that movie/TV adaptations of King's literature have (to put it simply) a spotty record, at best. Despite its drawn out pre-production process and change in creative personnel, IT  is one of the better cinematic interpretations of King's writing and certainly the best produced in modern times. As a coming of age parable, IT succeeds at being both horrifying and emotionally-resonant, even while adapting only half of King's original story.

On a rainy September day in the city of Derry, Maine, circa 1988, young Georgie Denbrough (Jackson Robert Scott) mysteriously goes missing after he sets off playing with a paper boat that his older brother, Bill (Jaeden Lieberher), made for him. Several months later, at the start of the summer of 1989 (and the end of the school year), Bill sets out with his friends - who together form a group known as The Losers' Club - to try and find his younger sibling at long last, despite his parents having already decided that Georgie is dead and gone.

However, in the process of searching for Georgie, The Losers' Club - along with new recruits in the forms of the socially-stigmatized Beverly (Sophia Lillis), home-schooled Mike (Chosen Jacob) and new kid Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor) - discover the terrifying truth about Derry: that it is the home of a seemingly immortal creature that can shape-shift and feeds on children by taking on the form of one Pennywise the Dancing Clown (Bill Skarsgård). When the Losers come to realize that Pennywise gains strength by feeding on their own fears, it falls to the young outsiders to band together and battle their demons from both within and from the outside world, if they are to stay alive.

In terms of narrative, IT  is more of a troubling and creepy fantasy allegory along the lines of Muschietti's directorial debut Mama than a "scary" piece of filmmaking. In that respect, though, the movie is faithful in spirit to King's source material, despite making some significant changes to the text - in particular, updating the time period in which the members of the Losers' Club are preteens from the 1950s to the 1980s. Muschietti isn't operating on quite the same level yet as the best modern mainstream horror directors (see James Wan, David F. Sandberg) when it comes to delivering scares through tension-fueled sequencing and/or building up to the spooky moments (e.g. jump scares). However, because it offers both more overtly disturbing imagery and narrative substance than many other studio horror films nowadays (even the R-Rated ones), IT  manages to be more "horrifying" than its peers, despite being less "scary."

The IT script, which is credited to Fukunaga and his writing partner Chase Palmer, as well as Gary Dauberman ( Annabelle: Creation ), explores the same themes of childhood grief and trauma as King's original novel does, as well as the timely-as-ever idea that evil must be actively confronted through mutual cooperation and trust, lest it be allowed to flourish. Muschietti's film adaptation does justice by these elements from King's novel, thanks in no small part to the charismatic and compelling young actors who bring The Losers' Club's various personalities to life. Between determined Bill (Jaeden Lieberher), kindly Beverly (Sophia Lillis), wise-guy Ritchie ( Stranger Things ' Finn Wolfhard), intellectual Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor), courageous Mike (Chosen Jacobs), practical Stanley (Wyatt Oleff) and hypochondriac Eddie (Jack Dylan Grazer), the Losers bring both heart and humor to the proceedings here, making it easy to cheer for them as they battle terrors of both the fantastical and everyday variety during their adventure.

While IT  explores the pain and suffering of The Losers' Club with enough depth (some, like Bill and Beverly, more than others) to make their experiences and the characters feel grounded, it has less success at making both the adults that populate Derry and borderline-psychotic local bully Henry Bowers (Nicholas Hamilton) feel equally three-dimensional. Because  IT  only hints at the effect that its namesake has had on the town of Derry and the people who have long resided there (including, Beverly's own abusive father), the human villains in the film come off as being kitschy - as though they've been lifted straight from an actual 1980s coming of age movie, themselves. Pennywise's backstory and the mythology behind the creature isn't revealed in full here either (more on that later), but Bill Skarsgård nevertheless succeeds in leaving his mark on the role by putting a radically different (read: more chilling and inhuman) spin on the monster than Tim Curry did with his memorable performance as "The Dancing Clown" in the 1990s IT TV miniseries. However, whereas Curry succeeded in being a scene-stealer in the '90s small screen version of IT , the opposite is true for the movie, e.g. Skarsgård's Pennywise is overshadowed by the Losers' Club and their personal struggles.

Both Skarsgård's Pennywise and the setting of IT (2017) are, naturally, more polished in their presentation and design compared to their counterparts in the '90s TV adaptation. Thanks to costume designer Janie Bryant ( Mad Men ) and production designer Claude Paré ( The Age of Adaline ), the 1980s backdrop of IT is convincing and manages to include nods to the pop culture of the time in a more organic fashion that, arguably, something such as  Stranger Things does. Cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung ( Stoker ) likewise uses strikingly dark colors and shadows to create slick horror movie scenery (including, the sewers beneath Derry and the infamous Neibolt Street house) that looks far better and bigger than the film's modest budget might suggest. That being said, the movie admittedly has mixed success when it comes to using CGI to realize Pennywise's fantastical characteristics and the creations that he conjures from the Losers' imagination. Like Mama , IT is most effective when it applies its digital effects with a more subtle touch.

It's no secret that IT only adapts half of King's original novel for the big screen (as was mentioned earlier) - and though the film by and large works as a standalone narrative, it noticeably leaves a few smaller story threads dangling and questions unanswered, for IT: Chapter Two (as the sequel presumably will be titled) to pick up. The decision to split up King's massive source material into two separate parts was a smart call, since it allows Muschietti to deliver a solid horror filmgoing experience here - without having to sacrifice much of the substance of King's book in the process - along with the promise of a second installment in the IT  film saga that should only enrich its predecessor (and vice versa). Sine the film mostly lives up to the current expectations that are surrounding it, there's fair reason to think that IT: Chapter Two , with Muschietti back at the helm, will float equally well.

IT  is now playing in U.S. theaters nationwide. It is 135 minutes long and is Rated R for violence/horror, bloody images, and for language.

Let us know what you thought of the film in the comments section!

It Chapter One is a supernatural horror film based on the book by Stephen King where several children, including the younger brother of one of the film's protagonists, have gone missing. A group of kids called "The Loser's Club" decide to investigate the cause and hopefully save the others. However, they realize they may be in over their head when they discover their foe is an evil clown known as Pennywise, a being that preys on fear and has been the rumored cause of murders in the town of Derry for centuries. 

• Movie Reviews
• 3.5 star movies

It review: a horror triumph and the best Stephen King adaptation in years

They're not clowning around.

After drop-outs and swap-outs and years of development hell, the prospect of a new It movie became frankly quite terrifying. Fortunately early footage was terrifying in a good way.

Now the finished movie has finally arrived and it turns out we had nothing to worry about. Andy Muschietti's adaptation of Stephen King's hefty, horrifying coming-of-age killer-clown classic – the first of two parts – is everything we could have hoped for. Fresh, frightening, inventive, with exceptional performances from the young cast, we can't imagine a movie more viscerally and emotionally true to King's text, even though Muschietti has made some smart changes to the source material.

Shifting the action from the late 1950s to the '80s, we begin in Derry, Maine, as young Bill Denbrough (Jaeden Lieberher) makes his brother Georgie a paper boat to sail in the gutter during a storm. But the boat is washed into a storm drain, and when Georgie peers inside to retrieve it...

Few won't have already seen the unnerving image of Pennywise the Dancing Clown peeking back out at Georgie, and those who have followed the trailers will have heard a snippet of his childlike giggly-cutesy voice. But don't assume there aren't satisfying surprises here for spoiler-hounds as well as fans of the book and the '90s miniseries. This version is gorier from the get-go and there's a real sense of peril.

Like Stranger Things , It is concerned with a group of young outsiders. They call themselves The Losers Club: Richie, as mentioned; Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor) the overweight new boy; Mike (Chosen Jacobs) the home-schooled black kid; Stan (Wyatt Oleff) the son of a strict Rabbi; Eddie (Jack Dylan Grazer) the germaphobe asthmatic; Beverly (Sophia Lillis) the rebellious sole female of the group; and stutterer Bill, who's still holding out hope of finding his little brother even though his father insists Georgie is dead.

Building characters and backstories for all seven kids – mostly played by newcomers – is a tough gig, and by necessity the film is structured around each of them having a separate encounter with Pennywise, a shapeshifter who takes the form of the thing that scares each child the most.

Some work better than others. Regular creature actor Javier Botet as "the leper" who plays on Eddie's fear of infection is wonderfully disgusting and Beverly's vision of cascading gore is brutal, though the distorted creature that emerges from a painting to terrify Stan works less well – Stan is the least well-drawn of the kids.

It's an ensemble piece, though, and the Losers Club are best when they are together, capturing perfectly an '80s summer of banter, friendship and bombing about on your bike away from the adults. These are kids you really want to hang out with – and like in many King stories the adults are indolent and ignorant if not downright abusive. There's something at stake from the beginning, then, for the Losers Club. They need each other.

Then there's Bill Skarsgard as Pennywise – a very different interpretation from Tim Curry's iconic performance, often regarded as the scariest clown ever. Skarsgard's Pennywise is cute and fun and friendly and... just a bit off. The devil really is in the detail here and there's nothing more unsettling than when you first notice his eyes aren't quite pointing in the same direction.

Muschietti's movie is full of flair like this, as well as some impressive set pieces. It's funny too, with the excellent Wolfhard king of comic relief – and it is a relief against the human and supernatural trauma the gang endures. It is a perfect lament to the death of childhood: the refrain throughout from the kids is that they just wanted to have a fun summer, and it's made all the more poignant because we know that, of course, they never will again.

It works perfectly as a standalone film, yet this is chapter one of a two-parter. What Muschietti will do with the second part is anyone's guess, though he'll have a job to make the adult part of the story as emotionally satisfying as this.

The movie really is a triumph: pure horror that doesn't shy away from the genre, faithful but not slavish to the book, cinematically accomplished and really very moving.

If the clown doesn't scare people away, Hollywood could just have a true horror blockbuster on its hands. We've seen stranger things...

Director: Andy Muschietti; Screenplay: Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga, Gary Dauberman; Starring: Bill Skarsgård, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Sophia Lillis, Finn Wolfhard, Chosen Jacobs, Jack Dylan Grazer, Wyatt Oleff; Running time: 135 minutes; Certificate: 15

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It: a superb Stephen King adaptation fueled less by scary clowns than by real-life evil

The new film adaptation of Stephen King’s horror classic exposes the dark rotting heart of 2017.

by Aja Romano

In August 2014, during the nationwide protests following the death of Mike Brown, a photo went viral. In it, a woman named France Francois held aloft a protest sign reading, “I can’t believe I still have to protest this shit.” Francois told press she’d been galvanized by memories of protesting the death of a 14-year-old who died while in detention. While she was at the march, one woman told her she’d been protesting this shit for the last seven decades.

The same profound world-weariness looms over the perpetually overcast town of Derry, Maine, in Andy Muschietti’s new film adaptation of Stephen King’s It.

There’s a common mantra that circulates within social movements that we just have to wait for evil to “die out,” a pervasive belief that every generation inevitably advances society forward over the dead bodies of those who were holding it back. But if the past year has taught us anything, it’s that time is a flat circle and that evil continually resurfaces, armed with ever more powerful weapons. As the keeper of our horror-stricken national conscience, Stephen King knows better than anyone that evil is generational, that it must be routed again and again.King knows, too, that “evil” isn’t about larger-than-life acts, but about the everyday callousness, abuse of power, and indifference to abuse of power that humans practice as they go about their lives.

This truth is what makes Derry arguably the most quintessential fictional town in America. And It pulls off the feat of making Derry’s symbolic decay and encroaching evil a metaphor for the times in which we live, while still delivering the classic coming-of-age fable King fans know and love.

It is as much about the specter of real-life terror as it is the supernatural

In It , the titular evil entity returns every 27 years, and the group who must face it (this time around) is a band of children on the brink of adolescence. They include Jaeden Lieberher as Bill, the de facto leader who grieves his little brother’s mysterious abduction; Sophia Lillis as Beverly, the group’s only girl; and shy Ben ( Jeremy Ray Taylor ). Rounding out the group are smart-mouthed Ritchie ( Stranger Things ’ Finn Wolfhard ), incessant talker Eddie ( Jack Dylan Grazer ), the reluctant Stan ( Wyatt Oleff ), and Mike ( Chosen Jacobs ), who as a homeschooled black kid is the biggest outsider of them all.

Together, they form a charming, funny, and pure-hearted misfit ensemble: the Losers Club. This is a moniker taken from King’s book that’s not so much announced onscreen as it is implied with every awkward social exchange, every insult, every punch thrown by an oversized bully — and Derry abounds with bullies.

Stephen King is known for filling his books with bullied outcasts , from Carrie to Stand By Me — and like each of those stories, the kids in It inhabit an R-rated space that’s typically reserved for adults in the movies, a space full of F-words and violence. But while the bullies are terrifying, in King’s worlds, adults are always worse, exercising terrifying strangleholds over the lives of children. It’s this sinister reality that’s lurking in It ’s corners; come for the fathomless cosmic evil, stay for the reminder that in real life, evil is nearly always mundane.

The events of It kick off when Bill’s little brother Georgie has a shudder-inducing run-in with Pennywise the Clown ( Bill Skarsgård ), the shapeshifting form of fear itself that terrorizes and ultimately devours Derry’s children. The Losers Club are the only people in Derry who seem to be awake and attuned to the sheer horror of the town’s rising number of missing children and a death rate that’s six times higher than the national average. Driven by Bill’s quest to know Georgie’s fate, the Losers, drawn together partly out of friendship and partly out of desperation, begin a heroes’ journey to vanquish It once and for all — a journey that ultimately spans nearly three decades in King’s novel.

Pennywise is the most famous part of It. And he’s suitably creepy in Muschietti’s film, menacing and enigmatic enough to satisfy even the most die-hard It fans and Tim Curry loyalists . But while Curry’s iconic performance overshadowed everything that was mediocre about the 1990 miniseries, Skarsgård’s Pennywise and the many traditional horror scares he engenders aren’t remotely the most interesting parts of this layered, knowing film. That’s because Muschietti understands that Pennywise, in all his Lovecraftian incomprehensibility, is only a symptom of the larger evil in King’s mythos — the darkness that lurks in the hearts of power-hungry men and causes society’s foundations to rot.

It markets itself as nostalgia, but it’s an allegory for 2017

Judging by its record-breaking trailer, It is the most highly anticipated film of the fall of 2017. It could be easy to chalk up this clamor to nostalgia: Muschietti’s choice to relocate the sprawling book’s first timeline from the late 1950s to 1989 caters to that impulse (the second timeline will constitute an entirely separate film “chapter” to come), and the timing of It ’s arrival, between seasons of its spiritual successor Stranger Things , doesn’t hurt any. It is also rife with nostalgic cultural signifiers, from arcade games and era-specific movie posters to a shiny Trans Am and a running joke about New Kids on the Block that encapsulates the film’s loving teasing of its socially awkward protagonists.

But Muschietti’s largely faithful adaptation of King’s story relies not on nostalgia for its emotional underpinnings, but rather a keen sense of the present moment in all its deep tensions and ugliness. Alongside It ’s most famous storyline — Pennywise abducting a string of children from an indifferent population — Muschietti steadily builds out the real-life terrors happening in Derry and the lengths our protagonists must go to in order to effectively combat them.

The main teen bully, Henry Bowers ( Nicholas Hamilton ), is a violent racist who means to do harm and continually levels up in weaponry. Beverly’s father molests her. Eddie’s mother exhibits signs of Munchausen’s by proxy . Mike, in a possible homage to black filmmaker Charles Burnett’s brilliant film Killer of Sheep , is forced to stun sheep using a bolt gun while his uncle informs him that he has to learn to wield the weapon or else it will be wielded against him. Later, a wordless, lingering shot of Mike carrying the bolt gun to fight It reveals how fully he’s absorbed the lesson.

There’s an acute release in watching the Losers face down the onscreen terrors of It in ways we can’t face down real-life terrors. When the Losers finally get fed up and fight back against Bowers and his minions, it’s almost more satisfying than the fight they ultimately wage against Pennywise. Muschietti’s film might seem over-the-top in any other year, with its unsubtle depictions of hate, racism, and othering; instead, in a year that’s seen the dramatic surfacing of those elements , it serves as a grim, temporary catharsis — temporary, because the fight to defeat these social evils is never over.

It understands King’s idea of horror — and his optimism — in a way few King adaptations do

For every strange supernatural development in It , a real-life counterpart looms with equal menace. When not in his resting state as Pennywise, It constantly shape-shifts between horrifying phantasms and images of real people from the lives of our heroes. When Bowers finally seems to go Super-Saiyan in his capacity for evil, It presides over a creepy Candle Cove -like children’s TV show ordering him to “kill them all.” This type of juxtaposition creates a tapestry of magical realism woven out of dread, an atmosphere of omniscient terror that’s far more chilling than the threat of a jump scare around the corner (of which It also indulges in its fair share).

The supernatural elements are creepy, yes: Horror-movie staples like scary dolls, creepy old houses, coffins, geysers of blood, and gruesome visions of dead people are all here in droves. But most of these elements feel like dutiful afterthoughts — or superimposed homages to other King stories like Carrie and Salem’s Lot — rather than the main event. Instead, It is fueled by the ever-present sense of a spiraling loss of control.

In this regard, It joins The Shining and Carrie as the best of the Stephen King horror adaptations — films that understand that King’s novels are never about surface-level scares, but about the countless ways in which individual small-time acts of evil coalesce into terrifying systems of violence, often aided by an increasingly indifferent society.

In 2017, this is the most troubling message It could possibly send. Yet for all its dark social relevance, It is also moving, emotional, and even optimistic. The Losers’ love and loyalty for each other keep the film compelling in moments when the jump scares wane, and it’s this steady warmheartedness that makes It feel like the dream Spielberg adaptation of King that we never actually got in the ’80s.

All of this makes It the perfect end-of-summer movie: a film saturated in waning sunlight, with the innocence of childhood giving way to adolescence while childhood terrors give way to much scarier real threats. For King’s Losers, summer is officially over forever — but they’ll face the grim days ahead together, and for now, that’s enough.

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• DVD & Streaming
• Horror , Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Content Caution

In Theaters

• September 8, 2017
• Jaeden Lieberher as Bill Denbrough; Jeremy Ray Taylor as Ben Hanscom; Sophia Lillis as Beverly Marsh; Finn Wolfhard as Richie Tozier; Chosen Jacobs as Mike Hanlon; Jack Dylan Grazer as Eddie Kaspbrak; Wyatt Oleff as Stanley Uris; Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise; Nicholas Hamilton as Henry Bowers

Home Release Date

• January 9, 2018
• Andy Muschietti

Distributor

• Warner Bros.

Movie Review

When I was a kid, I often listened to the Mister Rogers song, “You Can Never Go Down the Drain.” The rain may go down , he assured me, But you can’t go down. You’re bigger than any bathroom drain.

Pennywise begs to differ.

The Dancing Clown lives in the dank, dark underworld where the drains of Derry, Maine, lead. He’s led many a child down drain and tunnel. It’s just a matter of asking nicely enough. Pulling hard enough. Cutting deeply enough.

Going down into Pennywise’s world is easy. It’s the leaving that’s hard.

Georgie Denbrough finds that world during a rainstorm, following his paper boat down the gutters until it vanishes into a storm drain. Georgie peers into the darkness … and he vanishes, too.

People plaster posters across town, begging for information on Georgie’s disappearance. But soon they’re papered over by those of another missing child. And another. And another.

Even children who don’t disappear begin seeing … things. A picture of a twisted woman comes to life. Burning hands claw through cracks in a door. A headless child haunts the library.

And then there’s the clown, of course. Always the clown, with his bright red hair and rat-like teeth. He stares from shadows, hides in boxes, lurks in the drains.

The adults seem oblivious. Clueless. But the children … they see. They hear. They know.

You can go down the drain.

Positive Elements

Fear is a funny thing. It can cause us to shrink into ourselves and turn cold and selfish. But when we find the courage to face our fears, we become better people.

Bill Denbrough, Georgie’s older brother, has as much reason as anyone to be terrified of what’s lurking under Derry’s streets. But the boy, about 12 years old, is determined to find his brother—or at least find out what happened to him. He implores his friends to help him on his quest, telling them (quite truthfully in context) that it’s up to them to deal with the evil underneath. “What happens when another Georgie goes missing?” he asks his six friends.

Not everyone is particularly interested in following Bill on this crusade. But they stick together (mostly) and form what they informally call the Losers’ Club. And there’s something about their bond that seems to work. The movie tells us that we’re stronger together than apart, that when we work together we can do what would seem to be impossible.

The kids’ bond is even effective when dealing with more real-world dangers, too. While each member of the Losers’ Club has suffered mightily at the hands of Derry’s bullies (led by the truly sadistic ruffian Henry Bowers), together they find the strength and the will to stand up for themselves and others (albeit sometimes in violent ways).

Spiritual Elements

Pennywise’s power is inherently supernatural. While he often shows up as a clown, the evil inside the monster shifts shapes at will—transforming into everything from a living painting subject to a little boy. And while the movie never overtly tells us that Pennywise is a demonic entity, the story’s imagery often ties the clown to Christian depictions of hell: At one point, Pennywise introduces himself by dancing in front of a wall of fire.

Stan, one of Bill’s friends, is Jewish—the son of the local rabbi, in fact. He’s preparing for his bar mitzvah, and we see him attempting to read from the Torah in a Jewish synagogue. Some of Stan’s friends quiz him about what a bar mitzvah is and joke about circumcision. A bully uses Stan’s kippah as a Frisbee. We briefly see the exterior of a church.

Sexual Content

Let’s talk about Beverly, the only female member of the Losers’ Club. For years, she’s been the victim of vicious rumors at school, accusing the girl (all of 13 years old) of sleeping around. (We hear her called various uncouth names, and one of her supposed paramours taunts her by grabbing and stroking his crotch.) Some of the Club members believe the rumors at first—pointing to a school play in which she kissed the leading man. “You can’t fake that kind of passion,” one of them sagely says. But Beverly later tells Bill that the rumors aren’t true: She’s only kissed one boy.

While that may indeed be true, she also seems to hide an abusive secret: incest. While the film never explicitly tells us that Beverly’s father has sexually assaulted her, everything we see suggests as much. Her dad repeatedly asks Beverly if she’s still his “little girl,” stroking her hair and shoulders. She obviously fears him. And Beverly’s father also asks her whether she’s doing “womanly things” with the boys she’s hanging out with, then throws her to the ground as if attempting to rape her.

Beverly is an object of fascination for the other Club members as well. When they go swimming in a lake, they strip down to their underwear and splash around. And afterward, when Beverly lies sunning herself in a bra and panties, the boys stare at her—as much in wonder as lustfully—when she’s not looking. Both Bill and Ben have crushes on Beverly: Ben writes her a brief love poem, and both wind up kissing her. (She returns the kiss of one.)

It’s worth noting that Pennywise capitalizes on what people fear the most. And the film may suggest that Beverly fears turning into a woman (perhaps because of her father?). While her friends are chased by clowns or leprosy victims, Beverly is attacked by blood and hair shooting out of her bathroom sink drain (possibly representing the harbingers of adolescence). When she confronts Pennywise itself, his mouth opens impossibly wide and turns into a massive, toothy slit—perhaps a visual echo of the myth of the vagina dentata.

Boys in the Losers’ Club frequently make obscene, sexually charged jokes about masturbation, the size of their anatomies, their sexual experiences or prowess, and the supposed promiscuity of one another’s mothers.

Elsewhere, a girl scrawls “loser” on someone’s cast. The cast’s wearer tries to change the middle letter so the words read “lover.” Beverly flirts with a very old, creepy pharmacist—distracting him while her friends make off with some needed medical supplies.

Violent Content

Arguably, IT’ s most graphic moment takes place in the movie’s opening minutes and involves poor, doomed Georgie. When the boy reaches into a storm drain to retrieve his boat from the lurking Pennywise, the clown’s rat-like teeth suddenly turn into rows and rows of fangs. He bites into the boy’s arm, and the next thing we see is the little lad—missing an arm—frantically trying to crawl away from the drain. He doesn’t make it: He’s pulled in, leaving behind a roadway stained by blood and rain.

That’s just the beginning of the grotesque horrors awaiting us.

A man gets stabbed in the throat with a knife, and his blood coats his body and the chair he sits in. A monstrous mouth clamps down on someone’s face, leaving behind bloody tooth marks. Someone breaks an arm in a fall, with the arm wrenched into a sickening angle. (A friend painfully sets the arm later.)

Henry literally carves the first letter of his name into someone’s belly, and later he nearly plays target practice with a cat. Mike, a member of the Losers’ Club, works with his grandfather in a meat packing plant that apparently processes sheep. We see one animal shot in the head with a bolt gun (a small spray of blood accompanies the act); other sheep are killed in the same way just off camera.

Dead people—either truly walking dead corpses or creations born of Pennywise’s bag of tricks—shamble through the movie in all their stalking grotesquery. One such manifestation looks like a leper, with parts of his face eaten away. Other zombie-like beings haunt the sewers. Blackened hands reach out from a door, as if trying to escape an inferno below. We briefly see the top half of a body (apparently bisected) hanging from chains but still alive. A headless boy chases someone. An old photo shows a boy’s severed head lodged in a tree. People get thrown around. Supernatural entities are hit and skewered repeatedly. A child is apparently shot in the head with a bolt gun.

Beverly is attacked by her father. Someone falls from a tremendous height, never to be seen again. A man is hit in the groin and, later, coldcocked by the lid of a toilet tank. He lies on the bathroom floor, either unconscious or dead, with blood pooling around his head. People pelt each other with rocks, sometimes leaving bloody marks on their foreheads. Members of the Losers’ Club make a pact that involves cutting their palms with a piece of glass and holding each other’s hands.

We learn that Derry has been the scene of unimaginable tragedies in the past, including an Easter-morning blast that killed 102 (including 88 children).

Crude or Profane Language

Bad news: We hear plenty of bad language here. Worse news: Almost all of it comes from the mouths of children. The f-word is used about 40 times. The s-word is uttered nearly 25 times. God’s name is misused twice, Jesus’ name three times. We also hear “a–,” “d–n,” “h—,” “t-ts” and “f-g.” We see at least one obscene gesture.

Drug and Alcohol Content

While her friends swipe medical supplies from a drug store, Beverly makes off with a pack of cigarettes. A bully smokes. Beverly’s father is shown drinking sometimes—a regular habit for him, the movie suggests.

Other Negative Elements

Bill, suffering some sort of sickness, talks about vomiting. The kids splash around in sewage “gray water.” Beverly has a bunch of disgusting trash dumped on top her while she’s in a bathroom stall. Henry Bowers licks his hand and smears spittle across someone’s face. Losers’ Club members make a ton of grotesque jokes at each other’s expense. Someone’s mother is deceptively manipulative.

It takes a lot out of a kid to deal with a supernatural entity that wants to kill and eat you. And finally, Stan—the quiet, studious son of a rabbi—has had enough.

“This isn’t fun !” he hollers at Bill. “This is scary and disgusting!”

The same might be said about this movie.

Listen, I understand that some folks will likely find IT “fun.” There’s a reason why Hollywood keeps making horror movies, and why people keep seeing them. Sometimes people like to be scared. (And as someone who enjoys a good roller coaster ride now and then, I get that.)

And IT —for all the many faults catalogued above—does at least offer a certain moral with its massacres. Our innocent protagonists are doing what they feel is right and what they feel they must, pushing back against an unimaginable and spiritual evil.

I recently talked with Gary Dauberman, who wrote the screenplay for IT , about those themes. He explained why he has a special affinity for writing supernatural horror stories.

“I think that has to do with me really being a believer that there’s something that’s greater than all of us, and that death is not an end,” he told me. “So writing and researching these stories kind of reaffirms that for me in a way. Even if there’s a demonic presence, I’m always going, ‘If there’s a demonic presence, that means that somewhere out there there’s good.’ And a lot of times in these movies, the good comes from within.”

We see that goodness displayed in IT’ s young protagonists, without question. The movie, for all its content, still exudes a strange sense of innocence. It can almost feel at times like a Steven Spielberg coming-of-age caper, albeit one with far more f-words and senseless mutilations.

And therein lies IT’ s problem. The movie’s heart doesn’t dispel all the terror and carnage and extraordinarily adult problems that our young heroes must deal with. It does not expunge the fact that the adults here are often shown as impotent impediments to the task at hand. It does not mitigate our heroes’ own questionable words and deeds—the constant swearing or the near skinny-dipping or the shoplifting. A bevy of children may star in IT , but they’d be ill-advised to watch it.

Pennywise lured young Georgie into the drain by promising fun and adventure. This movie promises the same. But for those who venture down this drain, it will be a dark, haunting trip indeed.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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The New Version of It Is Shockingly Violent

The film is much more frightening that the 1990 TV miniseries.

Bill Skarsgard is not Tim Curry. You and I know it, Skarsgard knows it, and the director of It knows it. For any fan of the 1990 miniseries adaptation of Stephen King's epic horror novel, that will be the hardest thing to accept in director Andy Muschetti's new version of It .

Despite being open-minded about Skarsgard's Pennywise, I bristled when little Georgie Denbrough first encounters Pennywise in that storm drain in the film's opening sequence. Skarsgard has a baby face, which is heightened by Pennywise's makeup design; his full cheeks seem to equally match the clown's high, large forehead. And his voice manages to be more sinister than silly; it's much more high-pitched than Curry's, who played Pennywise for more laughs than scares. But by the end of the film's first scene, when Pennywise makes his attack on poor Georgie, you know that this is not a late '90s adaptation of It . This is a brutal R-rated horror film, one that begins with a shocking scene of violence committed against a child. (The woman sitting next to me literally scream out loud at the sight of what happens.) And the film will continue to be an onslaught of horror for its next two hours, culminating in a long, incredibly tense battle between good and evil.

By the end of the film, you might still feel a bit nostalgic for Tim Curry's creepy clown. But Skarsgard's Pennywise is an entirely new creation that stands apart from the softer, TV-sanitized version from almost 30 years ago.

We can all agree that the 1990 version of It isn't as scary as we thought it was when we saw it as kids. The 2017 version ups the ante—at times it's very stressful to even watch, which is the hallmark of an entertaining horror film. At the same time, it's not a broodingly serious horror movie, and that's a good thing: It is fun to watch precisely because of the stress. But while It had every opportunity to be a prestige Stephen King adaptation (think The Shining , or even Misery , with slow-building tension driving the scares), the movie falls a little flat in its tone, relying on the quick, visceral, visual scares rather than a slow-building, underlying mood. I wonder what it would have been like if the scariest parts of the film were its thematic notion that fear itself is an excellent tool to alienate, threaten, and control—which is precisely what the shapeshifting evil at the center of the story manages to do to the small town of Derry, Maine.

For the bulk of the movie, the scares come from a mile away—even when there's no clown in sight. Perhaps because Curry's Pennywise is so iconic, Skarsgard's is reduced a bit—at least in the first half. Instead, the monster takes various forms: a clown, sure, but also the creepy, distorted subject of a painting, a disfigured leper who hangs around an abandoned house, and a geyser of blood bursting from a bathroom sink (a nice callback to The Shining ). But in classic horror movie form, our heroes foolishly enter dark rooms, quietly sneak around corners, take long hikes through the sewers. And boom . There's a scary thing, there's another scary thing. Oh, hey, there's a giant scary thing that also loudly announces itself.

While It focuses mostly on jump-scares, the movie also manages to tell an interesting story with actual characters. The first act serves more as character-building than anything else, establishing the close-knit group of the Losers' Club led by Bill Denbrough. Each of the kids has one particular trait that identifies them as an outcast in their white bread, all-American small town: Bill has a stutter, Ben is chubby, Stan is Jewish, Eddie a hypochondriac, Mike is African-American and homeschooled. Beverly, the lone girl in the group, is on the verge of adulthood (another classic female-centric horror trope). Richie (played by the most recognizable actor in the film, Stranger Things star Finn Wolfhard, who plays Mike on the Stephen King-inspired Netflix series) doesn't have a tick, per se, other than a motormouth that delivers most of the film's comic relief.

The kids' individual fears are perhaps more frightening than Pennywise himself. Bill is haunted by his missing brother, Georgie; Eddie is stalked by the leper, whose body is rotting and putrid; Beverly fears her aggressive father, who hovers over her. (Every one of them is bullied by the mullet-sporting Henry Bowers.) Like the idea of Pennywise himself, the concept of evil is what is so scary—think, after all, how frightening he was when you were a child when you saw the fairly tame miniseries version. Childhood fears are always scarier in theory; once you turn on the light and see that the shadowy figure in your closet is just the coat on a hanger, the mystery is gone and the terror dissipates.

But in the meantime, there are the frights—and It serves plenty of them. The second act is a rollercoaster ride through an actual haunted house, each room serving up some sort of sinister set piece tailor-made for the individual teenage guests. But with all of the madness of a tense battle between an evil clown and the innocent kids comes the sense of relief when good inevitably triumphs over evil—at least for now, until the inevitable sequel . When these kids return as adults, surely they will find that the monster in It —either Pennywise or any of its various forms—will match the brutality they faced 30 years earlier. For us, however, we can rest assured that no matter the intensity of the terror, It will never truly be as scary as the It we conjure up in our heads.

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'It' is dominating the box office with a unique blend of horror and laughs

Following a summer movie season that Hollywood wants to quickly forget , it has a hit to kick off the fall.

"It," the latest adaptation of the classic Stephen King novel, is an extremely entertaining studio horror movie that will make you laugh as much as jump in fear.

That's the big takeaway from a movie that had some big shoes to fill, as it goes up against a previous adaptation, the 1990 two-night ABC made-for-TV movie that haunted anyone who grew up during that time. Tim Curry's portrayal of the alien who often takes the form of a clown named Pennywise and for centuries had been murdering kids from the quiet town of Derry, Maine, was masterfully done.

So not looking to top something that was already great, director Andy Muschietti gave the new movie a new feel. (Muschietti came on the project after Cary Fukunaga left over creative differences , though Fukunaga still has a screenwriting credit.) This new version is set in the late 1980s (it's the 1960s in the book), and it makes the group of high-school losers who band together to take on Pennywise more edgy and foul-mouthed than the kids of the 1990 version.

That leads to a lot of F-bombs and funny one-liners, both done perfectly by child actor Finn Wolfhard (whom you know best as Mike Wheeler on the Netflix show "Stranger Things"). In fact, the entire kid cast does well. And though it's hard to top Curry's Pennywise, Bill Skarsgård gives a solid performance, helped out greatly by CGI to pull off the scares.

There's no question this "It" will bring nightmares to a new generation, and realizing it has a good thing, Warner Bros. is far from ending things. Unlike the 1990 version, this movie does not delve into the characters when they grow up and have to battle Pennywise again. That means a sequel is certainly on the way and will feature the characters all grown up.

So get ready for another round of scares, and in the immediate future, prepare for constant speculation on which adult actors will take on the roles.

Watch: How sound effects for horror movies are made

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It: Chapter Two

Where to watch.

Rent It: Chapter Two on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV, or buy it on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV.

What to Know

It: Chapter Two proves bigger doesn't always mean scarier for horror sequels, but a fine cast and faithful approach to the source material keep this follow-up afloat.

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Movie Review: “IT” (2017)

Movies inspired by Stephen King’s fiction are more apt to be called “adaptations” than most other based-on-a-bestseller works.  Love ‘em or hate ‘em it’s generally agreed that King’s books contain elements that can’t be accurately conveyed on film or shouldn’t be attempted.  2017 has brought us two such extremes in King-Flicks.  “The Dark Tower” approached this problem by reducing his magnum opus to a dreadfully generic film that appealed to no one.  Now, a few months later, “IT” takes a more intuitive approach, mining the 1,1100 page novel for its core themes and crafting a story arc that is much more streamlined.

The surprisingly brisk 2 hour and 15-minute runtime abandons the adult story arc, instead focusing entirely on the children over the summer of 1989.  While there are arguments to be made for and against this choice, within the structure of a standalone film it makes sense.  Trying to cover all of the story, lore, and interwoven plot lines in a single film would have weakened the emotional build-up between the characters, which is the very essence they required to defeat the monster in their youth.  This choice to focus solely on the characters in their adolescence creates a very different narrative texture which differentiates itself from both the book and TV miniseries, instead placing it closer to “Stand by Me” or an even a less whimsical “Goonies.”  

Regardless of the structure choices made, it takes a special cast to pull off a story like this, and here “IT” undoubtedly shines.   Bill Skarsgård may not have been the first name that came to mind when cast as Pennywise, but similar to Heath Ledger, he disappears behind the facepaint and a truly chilling clown takes his place.   Skarsgård ’s version of the hellish harlequin is uniquely his, haunting in his own unsettling mannerisms.  He invokes memories of Tim Curry ’s infamous performance, while never attempting to mimic it.  The youth cast that makes up the “Losers Club” are truly exceptional.  Each and every one of them shine brightly, with Sophia Lillis (Beverly) delivering a knockout performance that shows talent far beyond her years.  

The only faults in this film lay within its own excesses.  The group of kids have such great chemistry together that at times we lose sight of the bigger picture.  Instead of being concerned with their defeat over ultimate evil, we start to wonder more about their day to day life and summertime adventures.  The writing for these kids is razor sharp and the adolescent zingers they fire back and forth rival many comedies this year.  Like the peaks on a roller coaster breaks to breathe and reset tension are essential to the pacing of a successful scary movie. But too much levity can start to round the edges off piercing jump scares.  Even some of the excellent VFX work begins to go too far.  In many instances, Pennywise’s movements, especially the unexpected, are exaggerated in post. It’s incredibly effective, one particular standout being the Slideshow Encounter.  The effects used make Pennywise seem to move in 3D dimensions even though we’re watching a 2D film.  By the end of the film, this tool has lost its novelty, at which point we’re subjected to the worst and oddly misplaced CGI shot.  

With so many films lacking in every area, it’s difficult to fault a movie for its excesses, especially when it results in such an enjoyable remake of a King novel.  IT’s highs and lows, atmosphere, adventure, and humor can be wrapped up easiest if you imagine it as a movie Spielberg could have made in the 80’s if he had a truly sadistic side.

Curious how the novel rates?  Check out our “Stephen King’s IT” Book Review 

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Wednesday, September 6, 2017

'it' (2017) movie review.

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It (United States, 2017)

King fans will note that the best movie adaptations of the writer’s work have been his non-horror stories: Stand by Me , The Shawshank Redemption , Misery, The Green Mile . His horror-related films have been of variable quality, with the best two being (arguably) The Shining (King would disagree) and Carrie . It may represent the best movie version of any King horror story – and it covers only half the material in the 1100+ page book.

The movie relates the events presented in the book’s “early” timeline – the one in which the protagonists are 11 years old – and time-shifts things from the late 1950s to the summer of 1989. The action centers around a group of outcasts who call themselves The Losers: Bill (Jaeden Lieberher), Richie (Finn Wolfhard), Eddie (Jack Dylan Grazer), Stanley (Wyatt Oleff), Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor), Mike (Chosen Jacobs), and the only girl, Beverly (Sophia Lillis). Following the death of Bill’s younger brother, George, at the hands of the sewer-dwelling Pennywise (Bill Skarsgard), all seven of The Losers begin experiencing visions of the clown and/or physical embodiments of things they fear. Pennywise, they learn, emerges every 27 years in the town of Derry, Maine to kill children and feed on their terror. This group, however, is determined to fight back – something easier said than done in these circumstances.

For the cast, the filmmakers went with a group of little-known actors. This is true not only of the children but the adults as well. Pennywise is played with uncommon spookiness by Bill Skarsgard (the brother of Alexander and son of Stellan). Emerging from the long shadow of Tim Curry, whose interpretation of the clown was a highlight of the TV mini-series, Skarsgard makes Pennywise his own from the shocking first scene, which violates a Hollywood rule about how young children are treated on-screen. Jaeden Lieberher, who plays the stuttering Bill, was recently seen (although not by many) as the title character in The Book of Henry . Finn Wolfhard is probably best known for his role as Mike in Stranger Things, a TV series inspired in part by King’s writings that incorporates the same kind of childhood bonding that occurs among The Losers.

It isn’t perfect. There’s too much repetitive wandering around in the sewers and the running time seems long for the material as presented. There are credulity problems with the resolution but this is common in horror where the vanquishing of a creature of great power and evil typically requires a contrivance. However, horror, like a road movie, is more about the journey than the destination, and It offers a strong and creepy ride. Stephen King fans can rejoice that Hollywood has done justice to one of the author’s scary books.

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‘Kill’ Review: The Title Says It All. Over and Over Again.

What begins as a romantic rescue becomes a blood bath when bandits on a train attack and rob passengers and our Romeo cracks multiple heads in return.

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By Jeannette Catsoulis

We are almost halfway through the Indian action extravaganza “Kill” before the title card slams onscreen, by which point its simple imperative — and the film’s entire raison d’être — has been obeyed so many times it’s essentially redundant. Much like the movie’s English subtitles: The dialogue might be in Hindi, but the language of blood and bones is universal.

Speaking it fluently is Amrit (Lakshya), a hunky military commando who has followed his childhood sweetie, Tulika (Tanya Maniktala), onto an express train to New Delhi in the hope of rescuing her from an arranged marriage. The lovebirds’ quivering reunion, however, is rudely interrupted by a horde of bandits armed with knives and hammers. What they lack in sophistication, they more than make up for in enthusiasm as they set about robbing the terrified passengers. Can Amrit and his military buddy (Abhishek Chauhan) stop them? Will the lead villain (a seductively menacing Raghav Juyal) upstage our baby-faced hero? How many objects can be inserted into a human head?

To answer these questions, the writer and director, Nikhil Nagesh Bhat, leaps into fifth gear and rarely downshifts. As Amrit arguably does more damage than the zombies in “ Train to Busan” (2016) , the cinematographer Rafey Mahmood, working with the action specialists Parvez Shaikh and Se-yeong Oh, meticulously captures near-continuous martial-arts sequences of balletic brutality. Exhausted as the actors appear, spare a thought for the film’s Foley artists , whose repertoire of squishy, crunchy and splattery sound effects must have been sorely taxed.

Manipulative to the max (one upsetting murder is almost pornographically protracted), “Kill” is dizzyingly impressive and punishingly vicious. In the press notes, the director tells us that he once slept through a similar attack by armed train robbers. No one is sleeping through this one.

Kill Rated R for 52 varieties of knife wound, one weaponized bathroom fixture and several ugly sweater vests. In Hindi, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters.

‘Longlegs’ Review: Nicolas Cage Worms His Way Into Your Nightmares With Dread-Filled Serial Killer Thriller

Osgood Perkins' ’90s-set horror movie disturbs more over time than it does in the moment, getting scary once its singularly Satanic boogeyman embeds in your head.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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Now here’s a first: Apart from the pale-faced freak show of the film’s title, the experience of watching “ Longlegs ” didn’t strike me as all that frightening. At first. In the moment, it’s considerably less scary than the ecstatic early buzz — ginned up by Neon via whisper campaigns and strategic advance screenings — would have you believe. Less than 12 hours after seeing it, however, the demented Nicolas Cage character resurfaced in my nightmares, popping up out of nowhere to screech, “Hail Satan!” in that unnerving, high-pitched voice of his.

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That nickname applies to an instantly iconic Nicolas Cage creation, no less disturbing than Max Schreck’s hunchbacked Nosferatu, a performance that has been a career-long inspiration for Cage. Like that early screen vampire, Longlegs puts us on edge with his twisted body language and exaggerated gestures — that, plus odd framing that crops him off at the head, explains how the character manages to worm his way into our brains.

Visually, audiences can scarcely tell it’s Cage beneath all that makeup: With his stringy white hair, pasty foundation and faded pink uniform, he look less like a man than an androgynous cross between Bette Davis in “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” and kindly character actor Celia Weston, who played the mom in “Junebug.” These are hardly your typical horror archetypes, and yet, once the film’s ultimate scheme is revealed, it leaves a more unsettling imprint.

We first see Longlegs driving up to an innocent girl’s white country house in a station wagon — easily the least threatening of cars, rendered ominous by DP Andres Arochi’s framing. The opening sequence is stylized to suggest a grainy home movie, with its vintage Kodak colors and rounded corners. Later, the frame expands to full anamorphic widescreen, creating a coffin-like shape that tends to isolate characters in threatening environments. As Cage interacts with what he calls “the almost birthday girl,” playing a twisted game of peekaboo, his demeanor suggests an incompetent clown or a bachelor uncle — one of those maladroit adults who grossly misjudge how to interact with kids. He’s the kind of sinister stranger little girls are well advised not to approach.

From this prologue, the film jumps forward from the ’70s to the Clinton administration to find Lee participating in an FBI search. She shows an almost psychic intuition as to the culprit’s whereabouts, but that isn’t enough to spare her partner, whose abrupt exit establishes how shocking the film’s violence can be. There’s a certain laziness to the storytelling, as Perkins relies on tired serial-killer tropes to skip over the film’s more egregious contrivances. (Lee’s personal connection to Longlegs is a coincidence too far, and the never-explained demonic orbs are more hokey than horrific.)

Rather than recycling the genre’s boilerplate elements, Perkins strips away most of the procedural bits and concentrates on distinguishing details: the eccentric mental hospital chief who dresses like a pimp, or the girl at the hardware store who might have been a victim in another movie, but instead deflates Longlegs’ menace when she quips, “Dad, that gross guy’s here again!”

Reviewed at Wilshire Screening Room, Los Angeles, July 1, 2024. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 101 MIN.

• Production: A Neon release and presentation, in association with C2, of a Traffic., Range, Oddfellows, Saturn Films production. Producers: Dan Kagan, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, Nicolas Cage, Dave Caplan, Chris Ferguson. Executive producers: Jason Cloth, Andrea Bucko, Ronnie Exley, Lawrence Minicone, Sean Krajewski, David Gendron, Liz Destro, Tom Quinn, Jason Wald, Christian Parkes, Teddy Schwarzman, John Friedberg, Laura Austin-Little, Jesse Savath, Fred Berger.
• Crew: Director, writer: Osgood Perkins. Camera: Andrés Arochi Tinajero. Editors: Greg Ng, Graham Fortin. Musci: Zilgi.
• With: Maika Monroe, Blair Underwood, Alicia Witt, Nicolas Cage, Michelle Choi-Lee, Dakota Daulby.

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