Feels like two totally different movies mashed together; an occasionally suspenseful horror flick with visual flair.

Rating: 7/10 (25 February 2018)

'It (2017)' feels like two totally different movies mashed together. At times, the combination is successful, most notably when the rag-tag team of friends (whom are all played remarkably well by the young actors) band together to face their fears and tackle the forces that threaten them. For the first half of the piece, though, these differing genres exist almost entirely in isolation from one another, with only the occasional scare reminding both us and the characters of the danger lurking in the sewers just out of view. This lack of discipline, which leads to a slightly odd structure and a pretty lax pacing, makes the already long picture seem even longer. Yet the film is never boring nor does it ever come close to being so. The teen-drama aspects are compelling enough to carry you through to the horror elements later on. When things truly kick off, the feature becomes much more entertaining and suspenseful. It puts you in the shoes of the kids and becomes incredibly crowd-pleasing when they start to fight back. Even though it is never particularly scary, it is often fairly tense. The inhuman killer clown Pennywise is notably good, too, in both design and performance, though he doesn't appear as often as perhaps advertised. 7/10