In Brief: Not a bad horror flick but make It and It Chapter Two into one three-hour movie instead of  two films and It is one of the best horror films ever.

It was released two years ago in 2017. One of my complaints about the movie was that “it” — pun intended — wasn’t totally faithful to the book and was just half of the story. This naturally forces us to the business at hand and that is the positives and negatives of the sequel, It Chapter Two.

Perhaps sequel isn’t exactly the right term. As the title implies, this is the next part of the story. Only chapter two — in this case — finishes It off.

The first — and almost only — positive is the acting. While I didn’t find Bill Skarsgard’s Pennywise the Clown all that terrifying in the first film, director Andy Muschietti and writer Gary Dauberman do a much better job this time around. With a tweak or two they’ve turned him into something a little more frightening than what he managed in the original movie.

Unfortunately, It Chapter Two is straight ahead horror and like the 2017 film, doesn’t have much in — there’s that pun again — “it” to make you jump. Skarsgard’s positive and the story’s potential horror is somewhat undone by a dragged out movie and boring characters.

The real horror is a horrifying waste of a very good cast.

The adults are played by Jessica Chastain, James McAvoy, Bill Hader, Isiah Mustafa, Jay Ryan, James Ransone and Andy Bean. They join Skarsgard and the first film’s equally good cast of kid actors. Muschietti and the producers do a great job of finding lookalike actors that have enough similar facial features to make you believe they’re the kids all grown up.



It Chapter Two has the younger actors handling the flashbacks and the adult actors zeroing in on the evil clown.

Memory is important to It Chapter Two as it takes up the story of the “loser club” kids 27 years later. They are now grown up, have successful careers and lives, and remember very little about each other nor much about the chaos and death caused by Pennywise.

All they know is once the phone call came, no matter what was going on, they had to return to Derry, Maine and finish the job they started a couple of decades ago.

While the now grown up losers can’t remember much, we all remember from the first film — and the book — that every couple of decades Pennywise rears his ugly head. With red balloons filling the air, Pennywise kills and eats the children Derry and then goes into hibernation.

Much like the first film, It Chapter Two has the sometimes puzzled protagonists chasing the antagonist in the circular way most films use to pad a part two. There’s too much chasing, and too much of the adults alternately threatening to bag the whole thing, leave Derry and return to their dreary but successful lives.

The kid flashback parts give them reasons to stay.

Chastain’s Beverly had a vision when she was a kid played by Sophie Lillis. The vision said if they don’t finish Pennywise off they’ll all die. So instead of leaving Derry they stay in a movie that — itself — dies.

Not horribly but dies nonetheless.

Stephen King has been quoted as saying he loves this film version of his novel. He even does a wonderfully funny cameo. To be fair, It Chapter Two is a decent horror movie and certainly beats the chop and slash crap that has been passed off as horror for the last couple of decades.

Best of all, you can watch this film without knowing much about, or even seeing, the first one and not be all that lost. So I’m going to recommend the movie and give it a positive rating.

That takes us back to King.

Main character Bill Denbrough and the disappearance of his brother Georgie starts the story. It is a deep and troubling event that drives him to become a novelist and screenwriter. No one — however — likes how he ends his stories.

King has a similar problem.

He writes books that hook you and keep you hooked from start to finish. Ironically, like Denbrough, King’s climaxes often fail and leave you shaking your head and disappointed. The finale of the now two It movies falls into the head shaking category.

The why of that — or should we say “it?” — comes from Muschietti and Dauberman. They both did the first film and are responsible its padding and that of the second. This movie goes on for a dreadfully, and often tedious 2:49 before things are settled and we can pop out of theater seats where we’ve been settled for too long. The first film — released almost exactly two-years ago — lasted 2:15. Stephen King’s 1986 novel came in just one piece and was 1,138 pages long.

Are you sensing a pattern here?

Combined, It Chapter Two and It run a couple of minutes over five hours. Take this project and make it a single three hour movie and this is one of the best horror movies ever done. I am not a big fan of producers wanting to pad their bank accounts and profit portfolios at the expense of moviegoers.

Sadly, that is where It Chapter Two seems to fall.

Director: Andy Muschietti
Stars: Jessica Chastain, James McAvoy, Bill Hader, Isiah Mustafa, Jay Ryan, James Ransone, Andy Bean, Bill Skarsgard, Teach Grant, Jaeden Martell, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Sophie Lillis, Wyatt Oleff, Jack Dylan Grazer, Finn Wolfhard, Chosen Jacobs, Jake Sim, Nicholas Hamilton

Rated R for mature themes, language and violence. A bloated, sometimes forced, overly long horror movie that somehow manages to actually be interesting in enough places to recommend. Give it a 3 1/2 on the Friday Flicks with Gary 0 to 5 scale.

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Gary Wolcott has been reviewing movies on radio, television and newspaper since 1990. He believes — and this is an estimate only — that he’s seen something close to 10,000 movies in his lifetime. Gary is a lifelong fan of films and catches a couple of hundred movies a year. He believes movies ought to be seen on the big screen and not on the small screen in your living room or family room. While he loves movies, he also says reviewing film can be a real sacrifice and that he sees many movies so you don’t have to.

He is one of KXL 101.1 FM’s film critics and joined the news staff in 2014. Gary is also the film critic for Tri-Cities, Washington’s Tri-City Herald.