A spooky rollercoaster ride, but not a very coherent movie.

Rating: 5/10 (3 September 2019)

After the fantastic opening sequence in which Georgie meets Pennywise in the sewer, has his arm bitten off and is dragged away bleeding and screaming, this film goes downhill. Just like "Insidious" (2010), "The Conjuring" (2013) and any number of recent supernatural horror movies, the plot here feels like a series of disconnected spooky set-pieces with no real progression - the only real direction the plot goes is from beginning to middle to end, but everything inbetween is just spooks.
Admittedly the scares are quite good at times, as they usually feel tailored towards their specific character or situation (Bev is attacked by her own hair which she cut off and nearly drowned in blood, symbolic of menstruation, for example). Pennywise himself is kinda creepy-looking thanks to some of the contortions his body ends up in and the way one of his eyes is almost always looking right at the audience, but he shows up too often - instead of staying in eerier forms like Georgie or the headless kid in the library, he quickly turns back into a stupid clown, and that's just not scary to me. It doesn't help that his voice sounds like Scooby-Doo.
The performances aren't really that great, aside from Jaeden Lieberher as Bill and Sophia Lillis as Bev - the other kids are either uninteresting or super cheesy, though the dialogue they've been given is charming and feels just dated enough. There's something very off-kilter about the sound and look too (and not in a good way). The score is a strange combination of orchestral and electronic which doesn't work for me and the sound design is full of recent clichés like screeching, jump-scares or ambience whenever ANYTHING even remotely spooky happens. Cinematography is usually fine, but during the scenes with Pennywise there's usually some kind of distorting effect going on around him which makes him look superimposed into the scene.
Overall, the horror sequences are fairly good and sometimes creative, and there are a couple of good performances among the kids. I just don't like the lack of direction with the story - I can't even remember which order the scary bits happen in because they're interchangeable around the few important story beats.
5/10.