Stephen King's IT (1990) - Part 1

Hey, you! Stop right there! Don't click away from this page! Because this...this will be a review you want to read. A review fit for the kings and other important people. If you don't believe me, just keep reading. You won't be disappointed.

Stephen King's It was a 1990 TV movie that aired in two parts, mostly because the original novel it was based on was thick enough to break a person's leg if you dropped it on them. Which, I'm told, was the main reason so many known mafia associates were flocking to bookstores in the 80s – to get that fucking book and kill people with it. You might not find any sources for that, but I did say it, and I'm on the Internet. So it must be true.

Director: Tommy Lee Wallace

Starring: John Ritter, Tim Curry, Richard Thomas

IMDb

Co-written with Tony.

But now I'm just rambling – which is, strangely enough, exactly what the movie does. So really, it's okay if I just keep going on and on without ever actually telling a coherent story. I'm also going to split the review into two parts, just like the TV movie was split into two parts when it originally aired. Isn't that how these movie reviews have always worked? I write them solely based on what lazy jokes I can throw in just to parody the films in a weak manner. It's just my style, man.

Stephen King's IT was a movie I had not seen in full since I was 14. I'm in my 20s now, but this movie, I saw in middle school immediately after I had finished the book. In a way, I think this was the first major disappointment of my life in terms of movies. This was the threshold I crossed, guys. It was my coming of age.

We start this crap fest off with Bill Denbrough, a writer who has a very hot wife who keeps pressuring him to go places with her, but Bill is too busy writing in his bedroom. This scene is great because all it's missing is for Bill to muse to himself, “Man, I wish I was as good a writer as Stephen King.”

Then they have dinner and he says he doesn't want to go to London with her. This is immediately followed by him getting a call from his old friend Mike, who tells him in an ominous way that “it's happening again,” which prompts him to immediately start packing his bags to leave for his hometown, Derry.

"What do you mean you want donations because I went to college there?!"

OK, that was a lot of information. Let's recap exactly what just happened: Man tells his wife he doesn't want to spend time with her, sort of blowing her off in general. Then the next second, he gets a phone call from a man he admits he hasn't seen in 30 years, and he's rushing out the door.

I'm sorry, what's that sound? Yes, I do believe it's divorce papers shuffling about!

Then we get a long rambling flashback that shows Bill and his brother Georgie as little kids. Bill is sick in bed while Georgie is suiting up to go play outside with a paper boat. Oh the good old days when kids could go outside and do this. Nowadays, you get shot by the police if you do something like this.

Tsk tsk, what a young hoodlum.

Anyway, Georgie meets Pennywise the Clown, who hangs out in the sewer. If this is all sounding a little too much like Sesame Street on really bad acid, I'd forgive you. As Georgie is apparently a complete idiot, he stays there and talks to the clown for several minutes. Well, I'm sold: he deserves whatever happens to him now.

It's just one of those sewer clowns. You know, the ones that were popular in the 50s...

What follows are some truly strange scenes showing Bill going into his little brother's room and finding a bleeding book on the ground – I dunno, something about this scene just doesn't work when you set it in broad daylight with bright pastel colors. It just doesn't come off as scary.

Get that fucking ketchup off the book, you slobs.

His parents also scold him for coming in there and tell him angrily never to enter his brother's room again. Because, apparently, this is how people act in the bizarre, lopsided world of Stephen King's IT! Yes, how dare you mourn your brother? Only WE, the PARENTS, can have THAT privilege, silly knave boy!

Then we flash back to present day Bill, who looks dazed, like someone just spiked his orange juice. What's that? You forgot we were even in a fucking flashback? Me too, don't worry. The way this first part of the movie is told is just so bad, pacing-wise. You get a few minutes of the characters in their adult lives, then a 15-minute flashback of them as kids. I get what they were going for here, for clarity and conciseness sake, but it's sloppy as fuck and doesn't end up very engaging when that formula is repeated five times in a row.

One of the others is Ben Hanscom, played here by the late John Ritter. Well, he wasn't the late John Ritter when he was making this movie. I mean, it's not like they took his corpse and just painted open eyes over his closed ones and used a shitty voice-over or something. That's crazy that you would think that's what I meant.

I just had to clarify that.

Anyway, Ben is an insane man who tells his dates how fat he used to be as a kid, which I guess is a real aphrodisiac for some of these women. I wonder if he seeks them out based on the "I used to be a fat kid" fetish? It's also especially weird because it isn't like he's that skinny now. He just has money, and used that as a way to not feel fat anymore.

In his flashback, we find out that he was immediately targeted as a kid by the 17-year-old bullies who have been held back apparently most of their whole lives in the same sixth-grade class. They're super realistic bullies who like to do normal bully things, like holding knives to kids' stomachs and literally threatening to cut them wide open.

Oh, kids will be kids.

In the book, this was a legit plot thread and came off as scary. Here it comes off as hacky and goofy, without any kind of sense to it. But don't worry, there's all kinds of other terrible things going on, too!

Like, really, do we need a subplot about the woman in the group, Bev, dealing with an abusive husband? It's as contrived and shitty as any abusive spouse plot from this time period. I know it's a realistic thing that happens to people, but the way it's done here is so bad. Most old movies like this never really had nuance or subtlety to these plots, and didn't present them as a way to get to know a character. Instead, most of them are just really hacky ways to give women something to do. “Yeah, being abused is a problem women can have.” Go fuck yourself, movie.

But don't worry, this movie doesn't let you forget that above all else, it's a cartoon made for children who ride the short bus. Like look at how she “escapes” him finally: she throws a makeup container at his head, he falls on his ass and she runs out the door. He just screams at her to come back, because yeah, I'm sure she's gonna do that now.

"I'm really commanding a lot of respect right now!"

Then we get a flashback sequence, where her father smacks her around a bit, too. She runs away from him as well, and he shouts at her to come back, too, and doesn't ever actually chase her. Are all the men in this chick's life just vampires who can't venture outside or else they'll burst into flames? Jesus Christ. I don't know why she even puts up with the abuse. If she steps outside the door for a second, they won't be able to follow – it's foolproof. These guys aren't anything to be afraid of, they're total wimps.

So I know everyone who saw this movie when they were younger than 10 is officially Afraid of Clowns (TM) for life. But honestly, there's nothing to be afraid of, and I'll prove that to you. I guess we'll start at the beginning, in which the movie decided it really had to show us the essential “little boy in the showers alone” scene. Yes, I can see why this had to be in the fucking movie...

It's for artistic integrity, we swear! Then again, it's not the worst child sex-related thing related to Stephen King's IT...

Then the shower heads start moving around following him, but that frankly isn't that weird. This will be in our Jetsons-style future in a few years, anyway. But then the clown shows up, and while Tim Curry IS having a lot of fun here as the clown, it just isn't that scary. He pops up out of a Bugs Bunny-style hole in the ground and just kind of hams it up. It's literally like a cartoon. There's no way an adult could find this nonsense scary.

Those are actually Tim Curry's real teeth, by the way.

BUT... I guess it could be scary if you want to imagine that it's actually Jared Fogle dressed up in clown makeup. There you go. I made IT scary again for you. I am a fucking genius.

Just in case you forgot what he looked like.

But the characters never thought it was passe or old hat. Take a look at Stan, the one guy in the group they haven't bothered to show as an adult until now. Why IS that, you might be wondering? Well, it's because when Mike Hanlon decides to give him a call, his immediate response is to go upstairs and kill himself in the tub. His wife comes up and finds him in the most drawn out and ridiculous way ever, dropping the beer she's holding and letting out a scream more befitting of a terrible and cliché horror movie than anything else.

Oh, wait.

Come back here for the second part of this in a few days! It gets so much worse!

Images copyright of their original owners, we own none of them.

Nostalgia, Ghostbusters and the Movies

If you've been on any movie or entertainment site lately, you probably want to kill yourself because of all this Ghostbusters news. If you haven't been, I'll sum it up in the most non-wrist-slittingly-way possible: Sony, that master of franchises, wants to put out a Ghostbusters movie with an all female cast. The Internet reacted poorly as it always does. I personally just thought it was at least something different from a remake with an all male cast, which would just be contrived as hell, so eh, whatever.

But lo and behold...

I swear it's like they're just trying to spite me now.

It's the nostalgia dollar at work again. People just love stuff from when they were kids now. I'm a 20-something millennial whatever, so I can speak from experience – we all just love remembering the late 80s and early-to-mid 90s. Why? I think it's a product of the Internet, fast moving technology and what it's all doing to our poor, putty-like brains.

With the Internet, time moves faster and people are closer together. We grew up with this Internet thing foisted on us by the over-eager minds of big tech companies. With that came the ability of hindsight to things we couldn't just watch normally without a Youtube or torrents. When people my age were young, we watched shows like everyone used to – you know, on the TV and then we had to use our memories. Nostalgia! Then Youtube came along and Netflix followed and it was all a snowball effect from there – no longer did we have to rely on just thinking about things we were nostalgic about. Now we could relive it and watch it in all its glory!

Now, even though it's not that old, we're reliving that sweet nostalgia like 80 year old men discovering childhood favorite storybooks on a trip back to our childhood home before we die of cancer. I know that sounds sardonic, but really I think it's just a human thing that everyone goes through no matter the age – we all love remembering things from when we were younger. Nostalgia doesn't have a time limit. Everything in our pasts has some kind of rosy border.

The problem came when movie studios dug their pudgy fingers into that proverbial rosy-bordered nostalgic pie. As they are wont to do, they turned it from a sort of charming, somewhat happy new trend - “we can watch all our favorite Nickelodeon cartoons on a tiny screen in our bedrooms!” - into a giant corporate megalith: the remakes and reboots we have all come to loathe more and more every year.

This is always how it goes. They listen to us, they listen to the demand – not out of some kind of love for genuine art and fun, but because they see us as money-spewing machines that will churn out dollar bills at the drop of any new movie about something we used to love. That's the corporate machinery at work. Maybe at some minuscule level someone enjoyed what they were doing, but I dunno, I just get the feeling a lot of these guys have to go visit guys wearing cowboy hats in the middle of the night and get threatened with death if they don't obey what they say:

Unfortunately, this is the way it always goes – something starts off genuine, then the big bucks come in, and it becomes a corporate, controlled version of itself. So I imagine we'll probably get a live action Hey Arnold movie with kids from various teen pop acts and maybe Shailene Woodley or Ansel Elgort thrown in as a consolation prize. Or a Rugrats movie that imitates Baby Geniuses. With dialogue written by low-rent Diablo Codys. Maybe they'll make a Powerpuff Girls movie next and then make a male version of that to appease all demographics! The possibilities!

I also just think it's strange how political pretty much everything has become thanks to the Internet. I mean, people always liked to spout off about politics, and movies have always – always – been powerful tools to espouse certain viewpoints. But with the Internet, we can make anything political now! Now, everything that comes out gets scrutinized to no end and held up or beat down by increasingly polarized, extreme opinions. When the all-women Ghostbusters idea came out, people went nuts – some people were hailing it as a victory for feminism; others just beat the old dead horse of “women can't be funny” with some bitching about "feminists ruining everything" to round out the horribleness...either way, it was a circus. Rinse and repeat with the announcement of the all-male one again.

Can't this just be a fun movie? It's fucking Ghostbusters. It was a silly 1980s comedy with great comedians in the starring roles. Now, it's a big political debate. That's what the Internet does, though – it gives all these people voices and they become so loud, they dwarf the qualities of the films we're arguing about. Movies like Ghostbusters aren't so much about the movies themselves now, so much as they are political tug-o-war talking points for feminists and anti-feminists and who the fuck ever else.

Not to say you shouldn't discuss or argue about things that bother you in these films, but you shouldn't lose perspective either. By all means, talk about feminism in movies and the all-white-male demographic of Hollywood's moneymaking elite, but not everything has to be another hurdle in the battlefield for equality – as important as it is for men and women to be equal and for there to be diversity, I just don't see Ghostbusters as being any part of that equation. I guess some people do though, so...more power to you, I guess?

(Plus, the funniest part of the whole "all male Ghostbusters cast" thing is that people have apparently forgotten that they did two movies already with an all-male Ghostbuster cast...so, whether or not you're happy with an all-male cast in some new movie, it's just hilarious that you'd act like this is some unprecedented thing. I get the idea that eventually, in an Idiocracy-esque way, people are going to forget the original Ghostbusters even existed. They'll keep on arguing about the remakes, but then go "who?" when Bill Murray's or Harold Ramis's names come up.)

I'd be lying if I said I expected greatness from a new Ghostbusters movie in 2015. But that's not even the main point, and neither is the male/female cast debate.

The point is that they're only now making any new Ghostbusters movies, because now, people think everything from their childhood is God. Why didn't they make a Ghostbusters III or spin-offs back in the 90s when the original was still fresh? Because there was no market for it then. There is one now, thanks to the nostalgia craze born from the Internet. Hollywood saw dollar signs and decided they could make money off it. That's the truth. It's commercialized, focus-tested nostalgia and it's how they do everything, from superheroes to remakes of classic horror films to now, classic childhood movies and cartoons. Nothing new under this sun, folks.

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.

David Cronenberg Classics VS Modern Horror: The Battle

Well, it's almost Halloween again, so that means I'm actually going to have to talk about horror movies at some point! Yes, I know, what a shocker. But enough about that. Let's talk about David Cronenberg.

If you don't know him, well, you'll want to after this – the man is famous now for making movies about Robert Pattinson riding around in limousines, but back in the day, he was famous for horror. Really fuckin' good horror, too. The kind of horror that was unique, creative, weird and trippy, full of social commentary, interesting characters, interesting visuals...man, they were just so goddamn good. What do we get now? Dime-a-dozen exorcist possession flicks, remakes and torture porn. It's just about enough to make you want to build a time machine and head back to that time to experience it all firsthand.

I mean really, where's the contest? In The Fly, Cronenberg wowed us with a tale of a man tampering with science and turning into a monster. There was also a subtext about aging and disease and even a bit near the end that tackled pregnancy in the face of disease. It was a powerful film and was actually about something. Through Jeff Goldblum's frenetic performance balanced against the horror of his on-screen co-stars, there's a real sense of tragedy and horror at what he's going through which mirrors real life decay, disease or just aging – as well as the terror of a man messing with science.

What is Dead Silence about? A fucking dummy makes dumb ghost stories happen while the worst detective in the world digs up puppet graves. Where's the social commentary?

Real horror doesn't just come from the director shoving something scary in your face and saying “boo.” There has to be some kind of story or concept that reflects something in reality – or else, what incentive is there to give a shit? Yes, to some degree horror movies can just be mindless entertainment, as any genre has a subset like that. But we've reached an oversaturating point when movies intended for that purpose fail at being entertaining.

In Videodrome, Cronenberg lays on the satire thick, weaving a tale of the modern day obsession with violence on TV and making it into a warped, psychedelic tale of a smarmy TV station exec who becomes embroiled in a strange otherworldly cult's conspiracy to take over the world. It's completely bizarre and insane, but you do get the point driven in – if with the subtlety of the nails hammered into Christ's hands.

What do we get in Sharknado? “LOL, bad movies are hilarious! Look how bad we can be! Isn't it totally ironic and crazy how bad we're being? But it's on purpose, so you can't criticize us at all!”

There's just no comparison here. In the old days, movies weren't afraid to be totally off-the-wall crazy to drive a point in, in the name of both artistry and entertainment. A film like Videodrome, despite being completely batshit, had a real direction to it and a point to what it was trying to say: modern TV is too gratuitous and violent. And it wasn't afraid of using the most over the top, grotesque imagery to get there, because that's what satire is supposed to be – going all the way back to A Modest Proposal, satire is about being as subtle as a jackhammer to the face. It's about being totally off the wall and ridiculous to drive home a point. (Well, yes, you can be subtle about it too. But that's not the kind I'm talking about here.)

Movies these days don't seem to get that on the whole – a lot of films these days are ashamed to be that way, as being over the top is seen as bad and not cool. So instead, we just get stuff that's ironically bad, removing itself from criticism by going “well, I meant to make something horrible.” Surprise, that's not how it works – you won't be remembered.

In Scanners, Cronenberg tells a surprisingly emotional and dark tale of the journey of a special psychic man (a “Scanner”) to help save the world from what he's told is an evil Scanner. I don't want to spoil too much of it for those of you who for some reason haven't seen it yet, but it's actually a very deceptive story about trusting in large powerful corporations (or whatever deity holds its influence over you) and about belonging to a group – nothing is as it seems. The film is a tortured epic and tells a story about corruption and lies.

One thing the film is great at is explaining its very complex and multi-faceted universe – as this is a science fiction tale about things we don't normally experience in real life, it's obviously necessary to have some explanation and exposition in there. But it's done tastefully. When this movie explains shit, it keeps those explanations short and lets you know the facts without being egregious about it. And you do care, because you want to see the main character succeed and you're interested in what the hell's going to happen next – so the explanations have more gravity. Going off that, you also have NO CLUE what's going to happen – it's not a predictable film and so you're actually sitting there wondering what's going to happen, and thus the exposition is important for that reason.

In The Conjuring, the exposition and explanation are there because the movie has no story. When the psychics Ed and Lorraine Warren are telling the characters what's going on, it's really just because the film had no other substance – there's no real emotional connection or depth to this story, no reason for the audience to care. It's just explaining and explaining and explaining, followed by jump scares, with a possession exorcism climax.

What am I supposed to be invested in there? The film's story – what scant little there is – has already been done a thousand times over, so you can't even fall back on the novelty of a unique idea to cover up for the lazy writing.

I don't even think Scanners is necessarily a perfect film – it's got some flaws. I don't think lead actor Stephen Lack is that great (certainly not good enough for the amount of screen time he has) and, as the movie goes on, I do find it gets a bit slow at times. However, its intrigue, message and overall journey from beginning to end are satisfying and interesting to watch. You at least got the sense of a powerful story being told overall. With The Conjuring, it's just empty – empty “go quiet followed by loud noise” jump scares, empty story clumsily trying to fill its own inadequacies with more exposition...there's just no imagination.

In The Brood, Cronenberg weaves a cautionary satiric tale of new age hippie medicine and healing practices, combining that with a very dark and surprisingly touching family story about a father trying to do what's best for his little girl, while also struggling with his wife who's gone crazy. Lead actor Art Hindle is just incredible in this, delivering one of my favorite lead horror actor performances. You get a real sense of his struggle and the weight on his shoulders. I especially like the scenes where he interacts with Susan Hogan's character, his daughter's teacher who he almost has a budding romance with – it's very tender, fragile and a little sad, and the emotions are complex.

The scares come from the shocking and brutal murders committed, apparently, by tiny gremlins which have a connection to the wife's therapy sessions at the new-age place. It's a strange concept, but the murders are grisly and the way the characters react to them is very honest, dark and tragic – it's just a great story.

What do we get in World War Z? Cardboard cutouts of characters re-enacting the same old zombie apocalypse you saw in a billion other movies, only with zero substance or connection to the characters. It's got to be a world record for making the zombie apocalypse more boring than sitting through your high school calculus class.

If you really like any of the movies I've been slagging here, well, that's your prerogative; I'm sure there can be arguments made for enjoying these films as there can be with anything. However, I just think something has to be said here.

Yes, some of what I've said could arguably be called elitist in this article, but is that a bad thing? Elitism is quality control. It's caring about what comes out of a medium you love and having opinions. It doesn't mean I look down on anyone for thinking differently than I do here, it just means I think horror could do well going back to some of the creativity of its earlier years with directors like Cronenberg at the helm. Make of this whole thing what you will; it's just one guy's rambling. And if you haven't seen any Cronenberg flicks yet...well, make it a priority to do so this Halloween.

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.