4 hour miniseries.....(take out the commercials and you've got 3 actual hours of show.......that's a lot of commerce to swim through just give yourself a few jump scares.....)
A few morsels worth remembering......or not......
Tim Curry as Pennywise the monstrous clown....Dr. Frank-N-Furter surely commits fully, making himself a forever Halloween icon.......but after freshly slogging through the series' three long hours....after a while, Tim starts to remind us of an embittered old Vaudevillian, pissed off at the empty theaters he's playing.......
Surprise, surprise.....is that who I think it is? BQ broke into big smiles at the sight of a few folks who pop up in small roles......the ever lovely Olivia Hussey (the first Juliet we ever fell for in the 1968 Franco Zefferelli "Romeo And Juliet")....and playing town bully turned homicidal mental patient Henry Bowers, none other than one-third of "The Mod Squad", Michael Cole.....
Fortune Cookie Apocalypse.....this still holds up well, for the simple reason that the effects were done live on the set, with puppeteers hiding under the dinner table.......a lesson the filmmakers forgot when it came time for the big finale......
The Climactic "It" Stephen King once wrote about the moment of truth that all purveyors of horror must face (novelists or filmmakers)......you can artfully play hide and seek with your monster, but sooner or later, you have to rip off the mask and go, "Booga! Booga!".......in this regard, movie makers efforts rise and fall by the level of their inventiveness with technology.....
King's 'It', when not in the guise of Pennywise, is some indescribably horrifying, Lovecraftian thing who crashed through another dimension or galaxy to land on earth zillions of years ago. (I'll leave it to the rest of you to debate why such a towering, odious creature's greatest ambition is to peek out of sewer drains and dismember toddlers...)
Using the power of the written word, King brings this slobbering demon to life as only he can......the makers of the mini-series, out of time and low on budget, resorted to sub-par stop-motion animation........earning themselves the eternal scorn of anyone who made it to the end of the show, only to scream out, not in
terror, but in aggravated frustration, "That's ....it??"
As Duke Ellington could have told director Tommy Lee Wallace......."It" don't mean a thing, if it ain't got that swing....."
Hence the new movie.....Despite the TV show's sprawling three hours, King's mighty epic had no real chance to properly unfold and flourish enough to grip an audience........not with constraints of network censors and the whole 'get-it-in-the-can-and-ready-to-show-on-Tuesday' vibe of TV mini-series back in the day.........this tale begged for the talents of a feature film director with some visual imagination.....(in these days of franchising, they've easily solved the problem of fully adapting the book by simply making another movie.......)
Still, the TV show, for all its many faults, supplied a few entertaining moments.....and stood as a limited but respectable TV try at the daunting source material. And for Tim Curry's tirelessly malignant Pennywise, we'll give 2 & 1/2 beep-beep red nose honks.....(**1/2)
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