Stephen King's It
by Tommy Wallace
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Annette O'toole, Dennis Christopher, John Ritter, Richard Masur, Tim ReidDirector: Tommy Wallace
Brand: Warner Brothers
Writer: Tommy Wallace
Producer: Jim Green
Producer: Allen Epstein
Writer: Lawrence D. Cohen
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 188 minutes
Published: 2002-10-01
DVD Release Date: 2002-10-01
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Warner Home Video
Movie Reviews of Stephen King's It
Movie Review: Wonderfully frightening!
Summary: 5 Stars
In 1986, American horror novelist Stephen King released what was to become one of his most famous and critically acclaimed novels. The novel, simply called IT, spanned nearly a thousand pages in its first hardcover run. It had taken the author nearly four years to write, and had become an obsession. The subject of this work was the lives of seven friends who grew up in a small town in Maine called Derry, and the fateful summer of 1958 that bonded them to one another for the rest of their lives as they tried to survive a series of child murders.
Three years later, director Tommy Lee Wallace received a screenplay for a TV mini-series based on this book. Never being much of a King fan himself, he took the script with ambivalent feelings. By the end of the first scene, he knew he wanted to make this production.
The mini-series IT originally aired in the US on 18 November 1990. Split into two 90-minute parts across two nights, the mini-series effectively splices the interwoven narrative of the novel apart into two distinct Acts - the tale of childhood (90:05) and the tale of adulthood (89:35). In the first half, we meet the seven children and their adult counterparts - there is stuttering Bill Denbrough (Jonathan Brandis/Richard Thomas), whose younger brother George was one of the victims, porky fat boy Ben Hanscom (Brandon Crane/John Ritter) who has been forced to move to Derry after his father was killed in Korea, funny man Richard Tozier (Seth Green/Harry Anderson) whose less-than-funny comedic routines elicit the catch-cry `Beep-Beep, Ritchie' from his friends, the wheezing asthmatic Eddie Kaspbrak (Adam Faraizl/Dennis Christopher), the reserved Jewish disbeliever Stanley Uris (Ben Heller/Richard Masur), the beautiful poor girl from the wrong side of the tracks Beverly Marsh (Emily Perkins/Annette O'Toole), and the social outcast black kid Michael Hanlon (Marlon Taylor/Tim Reid). Together they are the Lucky Seven, or more appropriately, the Losers Club.
As children, they are terrorized by a series of child murders in their small town, and a series of supernatural occurrences that the adults of the town are apparently blind to - a thing that sometimes manifests itself as a clown called Pennywise (Tim Curry), and other times as a facet of their darkest nightmares. Without a name to put to this thing, they simply call it the IT. As adults, when the murders begin again, each of them must decide whether to fulfil their promise to return to Derry to fight IT, and whether as adults they can achieve the luck and magic that saved them when they were kids.
Is the mini-series better than the novel? No - but that is not really a fair question. Does it do justice to the novel? In some respects, yes. Tim Curry puts in one of the most memorable performances as the menacing clown Pennywise, that can change from jocular and amusing to brutal and terrifying in an instant. It is hard to read the book now and not picture Curry's performance in your head as you go. The mini-series also does a good job of capturing the nostalgia associated with childhood when you look back on it now.
Unfortunately, the limitations of the mini-series format mean that IT misses out on a lot of what the novel contains, particularly in terms of King's commentary on what it means to be a child - your limitations counterbalanced with the gifts that you have in your youth that you steadily lose with time. The coming-of-age component of the novel really seems to have been skipped over in the mini-series, and it becomes more a tale of adventure, rather than a tale of innocence lost. In an era where audiences are very willing to accept 13-part series made for cable TV, it would be quite possible to split this book up over those 13 hours and make a far more comprehensive adaptation that captured those aspects. However, when we can now look back nostalgically on the 80s, a remake of IT for the new millennium would struggle to draw a crowd. Besides, who could you get to play Pennywise the Clown that would be any more schizophrenically menacing than Tim Curry?
I hadn't sat down to watch this mini-series since the late 1990s, and was surprised at how much it held my attention all these years on. Some of the acting is a little camp and melodramatic, but that was the style of the era, and as such I can forgive these shortcomings. Ultimately, 14 years on from its first airing, this is still quite creepy, which is a rarity in adaptations from Stephen King novels, and I can guarantee that it will definitely scare the hell out of your kids.
Summary of Stephen King's It
SEVEN YOUTHS HAVE TO DEFEAT A DEMONIC CREATURE NAMED PENNYWISEWHICH DRESSES IN A CLOWN SUIT AND TERRORIZES A 1960'S TOWN IN MAINE.Similar DVD Movies
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