So, that's IT (2017) (no spoilers) into the memory bank. Perfectly serviceable big budget, mainstream horror film. I have no dog in this race (I...gasp, dare I admit it...have never read that horse-choker of a novel, but here is not the place to go into a thing about me and modern novels, especially huge ones) so I was neither demanding my perfect book memory to be translated to screen (still smarting after a mediocre mftv movie) nor am I old enough that I would have avoided ... this on principal. IT does what it does, with all its Spielbergian gloss and kids-of-set-types cursing and quipping, and snazzy digital effects, and suffers only somewhat in having taken this long to get here (so its resonances are already a somewhat familiar part of the popular culture, geeks4eva, STRANGER THINGS and all that) and, as I've said before, it's a shame that an actual "in period" film of the book (which, in a sense, is the Monster Kid generation facing real evil) can probably never be made and so we get more generic, replacement childhood fears than the 50's kids' monster rally (here we get a weird 1989 with 50s/small town resonances - would any librarian in 1989 have dressed like that librarian?), let alone stripping out the realistic epithets that, while perfectly valid in the book's time period (and from the mouth of absolute evil that deals in fear - I may not have read the book but I do know some things about it) just wouldn't fly for today's sensitive multiplex audiences. At its best, it achieves some creepiness and occasionally nails the kids' innocent camaraderie angle (I really liked the "Rock Fight!" scene). At its worst it feels reminiscent of a later installment in the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET series with a bigger budget (we even get that standard of 80's big budget horror movies - a climax in a scenario built as a giant set, here looking better than the crappy plastic 80s ones) in which the parameters of the threat are always in question because, y'know, unknowable ultimate evil and all that (which can still suffer a physical beatdown, for some reason). And, of course, it has the overdone audio production of modern mainstream horror films where EVERY SINGLE THING HAS TO BE UNDERSCORED AND OVERSOLD ON THE SOUNDTRACK, but that's a given. I actually would be more interested in seeing the second one, when they do it, and if they manage to scrape some of the Spielbergian gloss off, now that we'd be dealing with adults. But all this sounds more negative than I mean it to sound - the kids are good, the nastiness is fine. Perfectly serviceable. modern wedding dresses