When IT CHAPTER TWO came out six years ago I heard that it was really bad (a subjective opinion) and two hours and fifty minutes long (a verifiable measurement). The “bad” part isn’t really a dealbreaker for a courageous viewer like yours truly, but combined with the length it was intimidating. Still, I intended to see it because I’m a horror fan and a merciful soul (I didn’t even hate director Andy Muschietti’s followup THE FLASH) and I promised friends I would see it so we could talk about it. But every October since it’s sat there on my list.

This month I watched a Sophia Lillis and a Finn Wolfhard and a couple Bill Skarsgårds and I decided it was time to stop running. It was time to go back home and face IT CHAPTER TWO. I’m not proud of it but my method was to watch it in three one-hour installments like a TV show. I know that’s not the way to watch an epic and I wouldn’t normally do it, but it finally got me through. (And the filmmakers probly figured out that was the best way to do it too, because they’re just starting a prequel TV series called Welcome to Derry.)

I should mention a few other reasons this was not the ideal open-minded viewing. I haven’t read the book since I was a kid, don’t remember much specific (except that one part) and I have zero memory of all the cosmic shit that Stephen King nerds wanted to be in the movie. There are rumors of a turtle, but I cannot confirm. I also haven’t seen the mini-series since I was a kid and I haven’t seen the first IT movie since it came out in 2017. So the truth is that as I watched the adult versions of the kid characters from part 1 I didn’t really remember exactly who they were or what they did in the first one. I do remember the joke about New Kids On the Block, which has a callback here (as I sense most things people liked in chapter 1 did).

IT CHAPTER TWO opens in September, 1989 as Beverly (Lillis) tells the rest of the kids who call themselves The Losers Club about a vision she had of them as adults and Bill (Jaeden Martell, Y2K) makes them all “Swear if It isn’t dead, if It ever comes back, we’ll come back, too.” He’s assuming they will all grow up to get the fuck away from this town, and he’s mostly right.

The exception is Mike (Chosen Jacobs, SNEAKERELLA), who grows up to be played by Isaiah Mustafa (BOY KILLS WORLD). It turns out that part of the evil of It is that if you leave town you’ll forget about It. Since Mike never moves out of Derry he remembers everything and when It starts happening again it falls upon him to get the rest of the Losers Club back in town and remind them about It. Mike works as a librarian, with two side gigs: monitoring the police band for signs of killer klowns, and narrating IT CHAPTER TWO, while all the other Losers go on to high paying careers in various cities.

This being based on a Stephen King book, obviously Bill grows up to be a famous author (played by James McAvoy, THE POOL). He’s currently involved with the movie adaptation of one of his bestsellers (directed by Peter Bogdanovich!), which is already filming even though everyone agrees that Bill sucks at writing endings and the ending of the book sucks and must be changed and he has not yet written the new ending. Which seems like a terrible but also realistic way to make a movie. It reminds me of another book adaptation I saw, where the book skipped between when the characters were kids and when they were adults, and they condensed it to just be about the kids, but then they made a sequel where they did the adult part but also they knew everybody liked the kids so they also made some new scenes with the kids. Not a great basis for telling a good story, but what are you gonna do when there’s already a release date?

Richie (Wolfhard) also grows up to be famous – a comedian played by Bill Hader (POWER RANGERS). Beverly (now Jessica Chastain, THE HUNTSMAN: WINTER’S WAR) is not famous exactly but created a clothing brand they all know. Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor, GEOSTORM / Jay Ryan, Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent) lost weight and started an architectural firm, Eddie (Jack Dylan Grazer, SHAZAM! / James Ransone, THE AMERICAN ASTRONAUT) is an insurance company risk analyst, and Stan (Wyatt Oleff, KARATE KID: LEGENDS / Andy Bean, MALIGNANT) co-founded a large accounting firm. No truck drivers, landscapers or house painters in this bunch.

Present day Derry is still full of wholesome-seeming-but-actually-isn’t-it-really-creepy-when-you-think-about-it small town imagery like a carnival (with lots of clowns), a night time little league game, a Paul Bunyan statue (that will turn animated and attack Wolfhard like a deleted scene from one of his GHOSTBUSTERS movies), and a “Canal Days” festival where the mascot is the same beaver costume from HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS. It all starts when a gay couple (Xavier Dolan, BAD TIMES AT THE EL ROYALE and Taylor Frey, THE HOLIDAY EXCHANGE) enjoying the carnival get harassed and attacked by a family of homophobic bullies. I’m pleasantly surprised they aren’t (as far as I can tell) related to Henry Bowers (Nicholas Hamilton, CAPTAIN FANTASTIC / Teach Grant, THE THICKET), the bully from part 1 who returns as a possessed berserker. These non-Bowerses throw one of the men off a bridge where he does not drown but floats over and gets eaten by the current #2 evil clown in cinematic horror, Pennywise (Skarsgård, WHITE WATER FURY).

It’s an evil fuckin town, and not only in ways that seem supernatural. The constant gay bashing, the fat kid getting bullied by having his belly straight up slashed, the headlines calling Mike’s parents “two crackheads” when they die in a fire. (I guess that is supernatural, because in the end the headline changes.) It’s all part of a central theme that I do find interesting: the evil of It works in conjunction with small town small-mindedness. Just before the incident, Adrian and Don were talking about moving to New York to get away from this shit. As described above, all but one of the Losers did get away from this shit, and even forgot about it! Yeah, I guess they’re all in bad relationships, especially the ones who were abused by their parents, so maybe the idea is that they have to go back and face It before they can move on with their lives. Otherwise Mike is being pretty selfish dragging them back. I guess his reason is that if they don’t stop him he’ll get more powerful and escape Derry and ruin cities also, which would be a bummer. Like DEMONS with more bigotry.

When a movie is good I don’t mind it being long. Sometimes I prefer it. I do not believe this one earns the epic length. Maybe give it 100 minutes instead of 90 so they can be leisurely about the reunion at the Chinese restaurant (“Jade of the Orient”) before they start remembering. But other than that and the complication of having so many characters in two different time periods (the flashback scenes mostly unnecessary) it’s basically just a Blumhouse-style ghost movie, a series of encounters with weird shit, some more effective than others. For me I think a series of weird encounters requires a stronger narrative backbone and a sense of momentum. This feels more like getting lost for hours. A surprising number of the events are the adults remembering a weird monster they saw when they were a kid; there’s not even a pretense of danger because we know they survived and forgot about it until now.

I did like Muschietti’s movie MAMA, which introduced his talent for ghosty imagery, often digitally enhanced. Those sorts of things are the highlights here. The scene where Beverly visits her childhood apartment and discovers photos of Pennywise when he was alive is completely ludicrous, but I like the gag where she doesn’t notice the old lady (Joan Gregson, Storm of the Century) scurrying around naked and turning into a monster behind her. And the monster reminds me of Phyllis Diller in THE BONEYARD.

There are a bunch of fun bits like that. I enjoyed Pennywise getting a big mouth like the Reapers in BLADE II, various surreal helium balloon appearances, a crying-baby-faced bug creature that crawls out of a fortune cookie, a crawling eyeball, various zombified past victims (sometimes animated, sometimes animatronic), an animated hallucination when Mike doses Bill to explain a BILLY JACK/ON DEADLY GROUND style vision quest he went on, a swarm of tiny hands grabbing out of the sewer, a really good THE THING style severed-head-with-spider-legs, a giant Pennywise with crab legs, which falls over, impales itself and pukes up fire.

There’s lots of stuff that would fit well in an EVIL DEAD. If the best of this stuff was in a quick movie with a good, simple premise I might’ve loved it.

Muschietti and cinematographer Checco Varese (PROM NIGHT, G20) seem to have fun playing around (there’s a shot from under a glass table looking through the one missing piece of a puzzle), and the digital FX are way better than in THE FLASH. This had a big budget for a horror movie, but less than half what it cost for THE FLASH, and I suspect the difference is that the studio messed with him less so he had more time to get the visuals right. Even without the computers, Skarsgård continues his reign as one of his generation’s greats, doing a crazy voice, dancing around, working well under makeup, twisting his face around. I think we could compare it to Robert Englund as Freddy (who was also aided by imaginative special effects teams), though it honestly seems like more work.

Tonally it’s of-putting – Richie, being a comedian, is almost always “on,” and there are some funny ideas like when a little boy comes up to him and says “The fun is just beginning” but turns out not to be a creepy boy, just a fan quoting his act to him. I think Hader has the dark humor and dramatic chops to make it a great scene, but they have him play it broad like a Will Ferrel movie. Seems like a waste.

I did laugh at this joke though:

I thought I had turned around on McAvoy after being impressed by him in SPLIT and SPEAK NO EVIL, but I realize now I just like him when he’s playing crazy dudes. When he’s supposed to be the relatable hero he doesn’t click for me. I found myself laughing at his crazed reactions, especially when he grabs a neighborhood kid (Luke Roessler, DEADPOOL 2) and yells in his face that he has to leave town.

This is a little boy, dude, he is not gonna take up the initiative to move. That’s not how things work. How do you write books if you don’t know the most basic shit about human living? I’m guessing you suck at more than endings. And then he spends a bunch of the movie riding around town on an antique (honestly before his time) child’s bicycle. I think we’re supposed to take him as a regular guy relatably losing his shit under evil-cosmic-spider-clown pressure, but he would need a whole lot more regular guy charisma to pull that off. Man, you’re stressing me out, Bill. I bet Peter Bogdanovich set this all up just to get rid of you. And no jury in America would ever convict him.

After all these hours of IT they just beat Pennywise by (spoiler for the movie IT CHAPTER TWO) kinda how Nancy (tentatively) beat Freddy – by not being scared of him. But in this case also just being hurtful. Mostly they yell “You’re a clown!,” but also “You’re a mimic!” Seems like that one is supposed to cut deep, somehow. The scene is pretty laughable but somewhat rescued by how cool it looks when Pennywise turns small and sad and flat and then they pull out his heart and all smoosh it together while he watches. Yeah, I guess it’s a pretty cool ending. (Then there’s ten more minutes, including the house collapsing and Bill and Beverly kissing underwater and an epilogue where, thank God, Mike gets to move.)

This is crazy but IT was such a big deal that this sequel, which I haven’t personally heard of anyone liking, made $473.1 million in theaters. That’s more than $100 million more than SINNERS, and on a lower budget. I bring that up partly as reminder #4080 that box office is kind of a silly thing to dwell on since we’re not getting a cut, but mainly as trivia because I was surprised to read that. I guess they didn’t need me to get around to seeing it after all.