My son wanted to watch the recent movie version of Stephen King's It.
Now, as I may have mentioned before, I have found one - just one - adaptation of Stephen King material which I liked: The Shining. And I like that a lot. But from what I have read, it's almost in spite of the novel that it turned out to be a great movie. (King himself doesn't like it!) But every other King inspired mini series or movie I've seen has not impressed. I didn't even care for Stand by Me, his (only?) non horror work, when I saw it at the cinema decades ago. (Too much overwrought acting, and characters that I don't recall being all that sympathetic.)
So, would this reasonably well received movie change my mind - especially since I had not watched the earlier adaptation of it, and was therefore coming to it without preconceptions.
No. A hundred times no.
Look, I know you have to make allowances for certain conventions in ghost or horror stories - the most obvious being nervous people walking into darkened rooms/haunted houses/sewer systems that look more appropriate for New York than a country town, when every normal person would run away or at least go in prepared - but it can be pushed so far that it just becomes ridiculous, and so it is, repeatedly, in this movie.
Apart from that, was King himself bullied at school and dislike his parents, because now that I think of it, meanness of kids to other kids, and incompetent or nasty parents, seems to be a feature of a lot of his stories. The kid on kid meanness is a very big component in this movie, but it doesn't seem to have any context. It's just there.
The movie reminded me at times of the two other King movies mentioned above - but the use of gushing blood in this one was (sorry to use the word again) ridiculous, as to opposed to malevolent, as it was in The Shining.
Overall, I found it an unpleasant, silly and non-scary story - so very conventional in the way the scary music would start, and even managing jump scares which didn't scare.
And it convinces more than ever that King is a puzzlingly over-rated creative force.
He's a patchy writer. His stylistic range is quite broad - definitely not all horror - and he doesn't always succeed in whatever genre he writes in. The movies don't necessarily reflect King's own vision at all (as his dislike of the Kubrick Shining indicates) so one shouldn't necessarily take from that too much.
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