The trouble with this schlock/horror flick (and it’s an observation that might be made of all cinema aimed at younger audiences these days) is that there is no climax.
It is more or less full-throttle from the word go, with no real sense of tension, no ‘unknowing’ leading to the reveal followed by gasps of relief. We should never compare apples with oranges, but the famous shower scene in Psycho does not come until twenty minutes into the film, and even then it is merely pivotal rather than climactic. But instant gratification rules, so we should get over subtlety’s decline and stop carping. For otherwise, this is a pretty decent scary movie. A little boy, sailing his paper boat down the flooded gutter one night, encounters a clown in the drain. He disappears, leaving behind only a pool of blood.
His grieving, stuttering older bother, Bill (Jaeden Liebehrer) and his mates, including the pretty Beverly (Sophia Lillis), another new-age girl who puts the boys to shame, set about solving the mystery (this genre precludes any police involvement).
Stephen King, on whose novel the screenplay is based, has a great talent for writing about kids and small-town America, so it doesn’t surprise that there are heavy echoes of the melancholy Stand By Me (1986) in director Andy Muschietti’s adaptation – the characters are almost carbon copies.
All of the children are coping with their own problems, including bullying at school, sexual abuse, parental over-protection and just not fitting in. When they discover that their town of Derry (in King’s Maine) has the highest rate of unresolved disappearances in the country, with disasters unaccountably occurring every 27 years, their curiosity leads them to an abandoned haunted house – and you can imagine the consequences.
The clown would be more frightening if it weren’t over-exposed, but the Modigliani portrait that comes to life, because we see less of it, is a dead-set terror. The savagery at the end is made up for by tender partings and, naturally, the promise that ‘it’ will be back.
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