not very "scary", but still magnificent none the less

Rating: 7/10 (1 October 2017)

31 Days of Spookoween: DAY ONE
Film #1: It (2017)
Review: So far this year I have seen only one other film in the theaters, and that was the restoration of Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker which came on in the seventies, making It the first 2017 film I saw at the movies so far, as well as the only feature length film I've seen that came out this year period. And, It made me feel like maybe I should go to the movies more often.
The movie certainly has its major flaws, particularly the obnoxiously high volume of the music and sound effects during the "scarier" scenes, despite the fact that those scenes would likely be far more effective if they were left with total silence. But, otherwise is was a brilliantly constructed blockbuster that is really about far more than creepy clowns and shrieking jump scares. The coming of age material surpasses the scares in both quality and entertainment in my opinion. The kids are constantly exchanging in hilarious dialogues and the film takes its time to allow the viewer to really get to know and care for this group of charming, funny little characters.
There are definitely a few creepy visuals (I actually thought the special effects in this movie were well done despite their lack of believability, it gave the film some mild surrealism that is somewhat reminiscent of the new season of Twin Peaks, and anyone who knows me knows that I absolutely ADORE almost everything about that brilliant spectacle of a series, but let's not get too off topic) and some disturbing concepts (there is a brutal bully character in this movie who eventually turns to practical insanity; it's clear to me that this was probably ripped right from the pages of the novel, which further fuels my interest to read that horror classic!), but overall It did not really scare me. The scares relied heavily on shock value and that just doesn't work on me. I enjoyed a lot of the horror-type material, but it simply did not effect me as much as it seems to have other people. And that's largely because floating and balloons are not among my biggest fears, no matter how many sound effects are layered on top of them. But whether or not a horror movie scares me doesn't ruin or make the film exactly, at least not most of the time, and this is a perfect case of that. I found the movie to be entertaining, engaging, funny, exciting, and, in the end, surprisingly heartfelt, and therefore It deserves plenty of praise, and not only as a "scary Halloween movie", but as a really wonderful coming of age story that just so happens to contain some brutal depictions of children being chased by horrifying entities.