Reasonably entertaining but not really impressive.

Rating: 7/10 (1 February 2018)

I had pretty high expectations, all the buzz in advance made me believe that I was in for an extremely creepy mother-of-all-horror-movies, but it didn't quite live up to all that. Okay, it was visually well done, the special effects were great and the story in itself is exciting enough, with it's combination of sheer horror, teen-angst and coming-of-age aspects. But for some reason it couldn't really hit me in the belly, as I had expected it would. Maybe because I know the earlier version so well and knew beforehand how it would all turn out.
What didn't help either was the weird resemblance with the Netflix-hit Stranger Things. The precocious kids, fighting a supernatural force that the grown-ups weren't aware of, the bicycles, the one coveted girl versus 5 boys concept, even one of the actor kids who turned up in both productions, the (equally well done) eighties settings, it all impressed me as a movie version of Stranger Things.
And with horror-clown Pennywise I kept searching and finding the face of Bill Skarsgård (whom I appreciated very much in Hemlock Grove) behind all the make-up, it's a pity that the fact that he was taking up the part of Pennywise was so widely publicized, maybe such a creepy character works better on screen when we don't know the actor behind it (I remember losing most of my fear of Freddy Krueger when Robert Englund became more and more popular!).
Then there were some strange choices in the story (or in the editing?). When the kids have won the battle with Pennywise in the end, they see all the lost children float down. But we never see or hear anything more about it. Were they all dead? Did the police and families claim the bodies of their lost loved-ones? Why could Beverly, who seemed to be in the same state as all the other floating kids, be saved? Shouldn't that mean that maybe some of the other lost children could be brought back to consciousness also??
The acting was okay, I guess, if you like kid actors (the grown-ups having nothing much to do). The Beverly character was very wel played, and the Bill-character too, but the other kids were merely sympathetic. And it beats me why these young kids (I guess they were supposed to be like 12 or 13) had to be pictured so foul-mouthed (or is that real Stephen King material?), it seemed to me that the script was trying a bit too hard to make them look cool, which wasn't very much in sync with the fact that they formed a kind of looser-club.
All in all I was reasonably entertained but not very impressed.