IT (1990 TV Miniseries)

OH BOY, my memory of this movie was entirely wrong. First, I thought this was released in the mid 80s, not 1990. I also remembered it as being pretty scary, which it definitely is not! The effects are SO bad, it is hard to believe Terminator 2, with it’s groundbreaking effects, came out just one year after this. I realize a TV miniseries would have a lower budget, but still, the quality is terrible and downright laughable. How anyone over the age of five was ever terrified by this is beyond me!

Terrible effects aside, the adult actors in this movie all know how to act, many of them have given award-winning performances, but here they are on par with an incredibly bad community theater production. Every one of them overacted as if they were in a horrible soap opera; none of them seemed frightened, just confused. The child actors were 100 times better. One might say the bad acting was due to them having to act to terrible effects, while trying not to laugh and take it seriously, but the bad acting is throughout, even when characters are talking to each other. It is hard to know exactly what emotion they are trying to convey since nothing comes across as it should to draw you into the story and actually care about what happens to anyone.

While a lot of the book was understandably excised, since it has over 1000 pages (!) one subplot that they didn’t need to keep was that of Bill’s wife following him to Derry and becoming a victim of Pennywise. We barely saw her in the first part of the movie, had no idea whether she and Bill were happy together, yet we were expected to care about her being taken and traumatized?? No, definitely not, which made the final scene of Bill saving her not only anti-climactic, but just silly. Surely a better ending, that was rooted more in the relationship of the Losers, would have been a better choice.

Luckily for all of us who love King’s works, IT was remade into a MUCH better movie, even with the poor second half featuring the adults.