Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		3.0
Overall		4.0

It Blu-ray Movie Review

Whatever You Do, Don't Send in the Clowns

Reviewed by Michael Reuben January 11, 2018

You don't have to suffer from coulrophobia (the technical term) or bozophobia (the colloquial equivalent) to be creeped out by Pennywise, the villainous clown-entity with the voracious appetite haunting Stephen King's 1986 novel, It. In a literary canon rife with memorable monsters, Pennywise remains one of the author's signature creations. It takes an actor with a special gift for playing crazy to portray the nasty prankster on screen. Tim Curry famously nailed the role in the 1990 TV miniseries, and now actor Bill Skarsgård (brother of Alexander and son of Stellan) has donned the red and white makeup, with electric effect.

Of course, Pennywise is only part of the reason for It's continuing appeal, as reflected in the new film's $700 million worldwide box office. There's also another King staple: a moving depiction of childhood friendship in all its passionate sweetness and halting fragility. Without that element, It would just be a parade of horribles, and the film would devolve into a predictable scare contraption of the sort that has come to dominate the horror genre in recent years. James Wan may have cornered the market on such fare with The Conjuring, Insidious and Annabelle series, but It operates on a whole different level. It's the rare horror film that's populated by characters you actually feel for.

King's enormous novel was set in two distinct time periods, chronicling the experiences of the same characters as children and as adults. Director Andy Muschietti's (Mama) film is limited to the childhood story, which is why it is subtitled "Chapter One". ("Chapter Two" has been announced with an expected 2019 release date.) The script updates the time period from King's original Fifites setting to the late Eighties, allowing Muschietti and his design team to surround their young protagonists with decor and pop culture references that provide a more contemporary feel without sacrificing a sense of nostalgia. (Hey, look at the Beetlejuice poster! Check out the kid with a Walkman!)

The setting is the fictional town of Derry, Maine, where people, especially kids, seem to go missing at an alarming rate and handbills seeking their whereabouts are posted with such frequency that the old ones are soon obscured by the latest disappearance. The culprit is Pennywise, who famously first appears peering out of a storm drain as water is pouring into the massive underground sewer system where the evil creature makes his lair. Throughout the film, Pennywise will assume numerous guises, matching each manifestation to the particular phobia of his current victim. Like so many of the best monsters, the evil harlequin feeds on fear (and, oh yeah, the occasional chunk of human flesh).

The makeshift gang that eventually forms to battle the monster comes to be known as "the Losers", because that's how they're treated by the town's older kids. (Bullies are a recurrent motif in King; someone should do a study.) The gang consists of six boys and one girl, all on the cusp of puberty and each afflicted by a different burden of otherness (a stutter, crippling allergies, being African American, an abusive home life, etc.). As they gradually realize that all of them have been seeing supernatural manifestations of the same demon, and also that the adult world seems to be blind to the threat—or chooses not to see it—the Losers find themselves venturing further into danger in a naive but admirable quest to defeat an evil force they barely understand.

King's novel was filled with detailed back story on Pennywise and the history of Derry, but the script of It: Chapter One—credited to Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga (Beasts of No Nation) and Gary Dauberman (Annabelle)—wisely streamlines the mythology so that the film never gets bogged down in exposition. Certain shots are obvious nods to those who are intimately familiar with King's novel, but generally It moves along briskly, even at a running time of over two hours, as it balances the scares engineered by Pennywise with the bickering, rivalry and deepening friendship among the Losers. As detailed in the extras, director Andy Muschietti cast the roles with age-appropriate child actors and allowed them ample time to forge off-screen relationships that give their onscreen interactions a naturalistic credibility. You can feel the bonds forming among them, as they realize they have no one to rely on except each other in confronting an apparently omnipotent evil that, like the spirits in Poltergeist, knows all too well what scares them. It's a good metaphor for the terrors of impending adulthood, which is no doubt why It continues to resonate so strongly with viewers of all ages.

It Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

It was shot digitally by Chung-hoon Chung, who has done elegant work for director Park Chan-wook on such stylish studies of evil as Stoker and the original Oldboy. For It, Chung was faced with the challenge of lighting the many dark interiors in which the film plays out, not just the sewers and dank underground tunnels where Pennywise makes his home, but also a variety of dim interiors like the bedroom of Bill and Georgie Denbrough or the hallways of the house that Beverly Marsh shares with her abusive father or the slaughterhouse where Mike Hanlon's father teaches him to kill livestock without pity. One of the visual strategies of It is to make the "normal" adult world feel as shadowy and forbidding as Pennywise's realm, and the continuity is effectively reproduced on Warner's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray, which captures the subtle gradations of darkness in Chung's frame, with only occasional slippage into indistinctness and loss of shadow detail. The brightest moments are typically scenes in which some or all of the kids gather together, but even these are somewhat muted in color and intensity, including scenic outdoor venues like The Barrens, the vertiginous cliff overlooking the lake where the gang goes swimming. Pennywise and his manifestations typically get the brightest colors in It, and they're almost always shades of red, including the bright red balloons that pop ominously out of the frame to signal the evil spirit's presence. Otherwise, color intensities have been subtly dialed down, draining the environment of vibrancy without succumbing to the temptation—too often indulged in contemporary cinematography—to desaturate the entire frame to the point of artificiality.

As usual with Warner's A-list features, the disc's average bitrate runs on the low side at 23.90 Mbps, but at least the studio has utilized most of the available space. There are a few fleeting instances of compression-based noise, but otherwise the encode appears to be capable.

It Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

It arrives with an effective Dolby Atmos soundtrack that subtly distributes the sounds of Pennywise's terrors throughout the listening space, from rushing water to jets of flame and everything in between. It's an immersive mix from first to last, beginning with the pouring rain in which Georgie Denbrough chases his paper sail boat straight into Pennywise's clutches and continuing through the noisy hallways of Derry's high school and the creepy decrepitude of the Neibolt house that is the main portal to Pennywise's domain. Off-screen effects are plentiful without drawing one's attention away from the screen, and the dynamic range is powerful and broad, with deep bass extension that may rattle a few loose objects in the listening room. The dialogue is cleanly mixed and always intelligible. The nicely understated horror score was supplied by Benjamin Wallfisch (Blade Runner 2049 ).

Note that the disc also offers a lossless 5.1 mix in DTS-HD MA, although I'm not sure what purpose it serves, since the Atmos track contains its own lossless Dolby TrueHD "core".

It Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Pennywise Lives! (1080p; 1.78:1; 16:25): How Pennywise was realized for the film, with substantial contributions from Bill Skarsgård.



• The Losers' Club (1080p; 1.78:1; 15:42): Director and cast describe how they created the camaraderie of Pennywise's adversaries.



• Author of Fear (1080p; 1.78:1; 13:51): In this new interview, Stephen King discusses his ambitions and goals in writing It and the research that led to the creation of the town of Derry.



• Deleted Scenes (1080p; 2.40:1; 15:18): The scenes are not separately listed or selectable. A title card precedes each one.
• Sc. 10: Georgie catches boat (a/k/a Opening Gag Scene)
• Sc. 25: Stanley's Dad corrects him (extended scene)
• Sc. 64: Denbrough family dinner
• Sc. 74-77: Bill's Dad looks in the basement, et al.
• Sc. 98: Outside the Neibolt house
• Sc. 104: Evacuating the Neibolt house (extended scene)
• Sc. 108: Stanley's Bar Mitzvah speech
• Sc. 115: Eddie at Keene's pharmacy (extended scene)
• Sc. 132: Henry and Bullies wait outside (extended scene)
• Sc. 137: The Losers find Georgie's wallet
• Sc. 160: Denbrough family vacation



• Introductory Trailers: The film's trailer is not included. At startup the disc plays trailers for Annabelle: Creation and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them Virtual Reality Experience.

It Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Add It to the growing list of effective filmed adaptations inspired by Stephen King, whose track record must now be rivaled only by that of William Shakespeare. (Let's just forget about Dreamcatcher, shall we?) Muschietti and his creative team have their work cut out for them with Chapter Two. Having established such high standards in the story's first installment, they have raised expectations for the completion of the tale to an intimidating height—and this time they'll have to make do without the appealing group of child actors whose Loser portrayals are as essential to It's impact as Bill Skarsgård's cheerfully vicious Pennywise. Highly recommended.