It hurts

Rating: 7/10 (24 April 2019)

A crouching little boy picks the wrong time to be rational. It's just a clown, he thinks, nothing unusual about that. There is no such thing as monsters, George Denbrough(Jackson Robert Scott) decides, not wanting to feel like the "wuss" his older brother(Jaeden Lieberter) called him, right before he fetched the paraffin from their cellar for a paper boat that needed waterproofing, now in the painted man's clutches. After all, there was no monster in the cellar. Horror movies conditioned George to be afraid of the dark, like all children since the advent of motion pictures. But his kid fears differ from kid fears past. What goes bump in the night changes with every proceeding generation. "It", set in 1989, not 1957, the original setting for the Stephen King novel, reveals the fallacy of the period piece that the story purported to be. Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, and Freddie Krueger are the monsters that George fears; plausible monsters, all the more terrifying because they are recognizably human, more so than their predecessors, literary ones, such as the werewolf, the vampire, the mummy, and Frankenstein. Those two glowing pinpricks of white in the cellar recesses could be the eyes of a serial killer. It turned out to be nothing; just paint cans, when George pointed his flashlight at the storage shelf.
On a Derry theater marquee, "Nightmare on Elm Street 5" is playing, an eighties period touch that conveys how Pennywise(Bill Skaarsgard) has more in common with contemporary horror movie villains than his peers of yesteryear. The murderous clown could be John Wayne Gacy. The Denbrough brothers are part of the slasher film generation. As George walks tentatively down those cellar steps, there is a self-awareness; he is every screaming female or shouting male who didn't simply leave the house to avoid danger. George is living the trope. Bad things happen in the dark. In order to be safe, he needs to be outside where it's lighted. When Frankenstein's monster threw that little girl in the lake, play was his intent, not murder. Unlike George's counterpart from 1957, this updated character has seen his fair share of gore. He grew up with depiction after depiction, often grisly, of deliberate killings. Betty Ripson is missing. George knows that adults are the real monsters. They were hockey masks. They wear ugly long-sleeved sweaters. Monsters from vintage horror movies rarely, if ever, finished the job on children. The juxtaposition of Pennywise and Freddie Krueger(Robert Englund), in this new adaptation of "It", breaks down a fourth wall in King's 1986 novel that nobody had noticed. Frankenstein kills the girl, but her drowning wasn't premeditated. The clown, just like Freddie Krueger, and unlike a vampire circa 1957, has no limits to the satiation of his bloodlust. And there is intention. Pennywise lures George close enough with the recovered paper boat as bait and bites his hand clean off the arm. The boy crawls away in vain before Pennywise drags him into the sewer, leaving behind a mix of blood and rainwater on the street. "It", in retrospect, was always dressed in eighties clothing. Wes Craven's "A Nightmare on Elm Street" came out in 1984. And in 1985, "The Goonies", directed by Richard Donner, practically provides the template for Stephen King's tome about good and evil.
Filmmaker and dad Steven Spielberg, in 2002, wanted to please moms, so for the twentieth anniversary of "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial", he digitally-erased the guns held by FBI men and replaced them with walkie-talkies throughout the penultimate sequence, in which Elliot(Henry Thomas) and the boys race towards their barricaded area on two-wheels. After all, it's a children's movie, Spielberg thought. When E.T. uses his heartlight to elevate their bicycles into the sky, what are the feds going to do: Shoot them down? To make "The Goonies" more kid-friendly, however, whitewashing all potentiality for violence is an impossibility, because like Andy Muschetti's adaptation of "It", this group of outcasts, too, face a monster, albeit a human one: Mama Fratelli(Anne Ramsey). Pennywise lived in the house on Neibolt Street. The Fratelli brothers, Jake(Robert Daivi) and Francis(Joe Pantaliano) and their mother, wanted by the law, take up temporary residence at a restaurant, shuttered-down for the summer. Arguably, the gang's matriarch nearly matches the clown's malevolence towards children. If necessary, she would kill. Under the flimsiest pretenses of being a restaurant, Mama, the waitress from hell, asks the boys for their order. Water is the near-consensus choice. Only Mouth(Corey Feldman), the clueless wiseacre, misses all the signals and goes into shtick mode, pretending to be an old world Sicilian accustomed to fine Italian cuisine. With one hand, the crotchety old lady silences the boy by making both cheeks meet, forcing his lips to purse, his eyes to pop, and his disposition to change, while she pulls out a switchblade. "We only serve tongue here," Mama announces. This is no idle threat; we believe her. She put bullet holes into at least one of the two federal agents. She seems fully capable of leaving Mouth tongue-less. That's because the mother is a genuine sociopath, who constantly tests the parameters of a designated PG-rated film. This realism, the possibility of dying by felonious, not accidental means is what sets "The Goonies" apart from other children's movies, and closer to the filmic world of Derry, Maine. Noting their prepubescence, the old woman turns lewd, asking the boys if they "like tongue", a joke seemingly about cannibalism until Andy(Kerri Green) mistakenly kisses Mikey(Sean Astin) at the wishing well, turning the bon mot into a double entendre. Back home, before their adventure starts, Chunk(Jeff Cohen) drops Mrs. Walsh's David statue and his "junk" breaks off. "It's mom's favorite part," Mikey complains. Chunk gets razzed for gluing it back on, but if you take a closer look, the reattachment perfectly mimics the state that Mike is in. During the kiss, it becomes Mikey's favorite part, too. The growing pains of a shy tween like Mike Walsh undergoes, "The Goonies", with ninja precision, encapsulates in that Michelangelo nude. Stephen King is not a ninja. The unfilmable rite of passage scene remains unfilmable. In "It", the soundtrack of reaching all the bases, and "it" itself, that runs wild through the young boys' imagination is old-school rap. Nobody is going to "Bust a Move" on Beverly Marsh(Sophia Lillis), who sunbathes, oblivious to her feminine wiles, after an afternoon swim in the reservoir, because they have no idea how to bust a move. That is the dissonance of the King novel. It's a fifties period-piece, in which the characters are not only too bloodied, but also too precocious, and too young to make Caligula blush.
Sloth(John Matuszak) is not "it". The hideously disfigured son, the forgotten Martelli, secreted away in his private room, with only the television for company, could be one of Pennywise's waking nightmare manifestations. Surely, he would scare the bejesus out of Stan(Wyatt Oleff), since the ogre-like man is abstract, just like the woman in the painting. Outside the gilded frame, an artfully-rendered body is a deformed body that becomes the moving focal point of dislocation in the physical world. "An it, a giant it; they got it chained to the wall," Mike exclaims to his older brother Bran(Josh Brolin), before they go back inside to resume the search for One-Eyed Willie's treasure. The proverbial "it" in the King novel is a gargantuan spider. The clown is a manifestation of that arachnoid, a she. Interestingly enough, when Mikey notifies Mama that he needs to use the bathroom, Chunk discourages the visit, explaining to the proprietor that "they might have daddy long legs in them". In the made-for-television 1990 adaptation of "It", the arachnoid could easily be mistaken for a he. The spider is androgynous. Mama Fratelli is androgynous, too. All the boys answer, "Thank you mam," when she sets down four cups of brown water, except for Mikey, who mistakenly says, "Thank you, sir." At the pirate ship, later in the film, Mama points a gun at the children, who are busy enriching themselves with treasure. She would pull the trigger, or rather, it would pull the trigger. Mama Fratelli would bite George's hand off if he had a diamond in it. The transference act that King had performed gets negated by moving "It" to the late-eighties. "The Goonies" latency that was always there seems less like a dislocation of content, since violence committed against children in film and literature contemporaneous to the fifties is something of an anachronism. It's not now; both in art and life, unfortunately.
The Chilean dictator in Pablo Larrain's "Tony Manero" goes to a bijou that only plays "Saturday Night Fever". He believes Tony Manero(John Travolta) is real. Pablo feels the authenticity in John Badham's film about the NYC disco scene. Travolta's next film "Grease", directed by Randal Kleiser, was a seventies film about the fifties. But the new songs written especially for the adapted Broadway show: "Hopelessly Devoted to You" and "You're the One I Want", turns the period piece into a period piece in quotations. They're too contemporary. "Grease" is a 1978 film about the fifties that has a distinct seventies burnish. The dictator senses the dishonesty. He hates Danny Zuko. The greasers are not good enough. The film projectionist doesn't know that he's in for IT.