This review of "It" is from around a year ago, but I never posted it on IMDb because it is exceeds the word-limit by over 500 words. Since I couldn't be bothered to trim it down to make it IMDb-friendly, I decided to post it here instead...
"None of this makes any sense". Amen to that, curly-haired kid. The only smart or true thing anyone here says.
We know that Stephen King is the undeclared Master of Garbage, but why exactly are his films so unscary? The simple answer is because almost none of them ring true. The characters aren't rooted in any kind of reality. They're supposed to show humans in familiar surroundings facing unfamiliar obstacles, but these "familiar" surroundings are anything but: they're so absurd that they're barely even human, too caricatured to be taken seriously as real people. King's primitive take on humanity is on the level of a comic book drawn by a small, dumb, aggressive child. The protagonists in his stories are misfits, buffoons, cretins, lunatics. Most are either mentally unbalanced or just plain evil - and that's just the victims! They're so over-the-top hence unrealistic that it doesn't matter what happens to them. I can't get into a story that badly conceived. Very little rings true. In which part of the universe do children talk and behave this way? The characters physically resemble kids, and that alone is enough for King's dumb fans.
King's grasp of human psychology is that of an alien, and one with handicapped intellectual faculties. He doesn't understand people hence how is he supposed to make his idiotic characters act like actual people? Part of that confusion is doubtlessly based in his very obvious misanthropy. Very few of his stories have a clear moral stance, most don't even have a moral compass, and he has no intelligent point to make, ever – unless you consider standard liberal propaganda bullshit to be an “intelligent point”. His stories are sometimes a series of pointless, loosely connected sadistic murders, and it's not far-fetched to presume that writing those scenes gives him tremendous joy, on a visceral, purely sadistic level. (I am not saying other horror writers are like this, I am saying he is.) Ironically, like so many Hollywood liberal douchebags, he actually deeply hates the human race, and not just in a general or vague way the way some of us do.
King probably detests himself too. There is ample evidence that his narcissism is paradoxically mixed with a self-loathing typical of political extremists. And make no mistake, he is a political extremist, not just a middle-of-the-road liberal buffoon. His treatment of conservatives and especially religious people (i.e. those who dare hold views that differ from his own) isn't light-hearted, clever or controlled: it is unsubtle, primitive and full of barely restrained bile. He hammers home his point about religious folk being dumb and evil with all the subtlety of a 16-ton hammer crushing a child's head. His "social satire" is no satire at all, it's far too simplistic and base to be considered anything of the sort. His obvious hatred of small-town America reveals his arrogance just as it is revealing of his sense of intellectual and moral superiority toward said demographic.
The reason I chose a child's head getting smashed as an analogy is because the movie has the poor taste to open with the brutal crippling of a very young child. King has no boundaries, which is further proof of his moral bankruptcy, and he'd probably write snuff novels about paraplegics getting their bodies chopped up into tiny pieces (and then served to cannibals) if only his publishers would allow it. (These publishers wouldn't mind such material, but western society isn't quite there... yet.) There is a reason why we very rarely see little children get decapitated in movies: because it is tasteless. Making a tasteless movie is the easiest thing in the world; just ask Maryland's most useless man ever, John Waters. The tough part is making a scary movie without resorting to snuffisms. Only gifted film-makers and writers can pull that off.
There is that mind-bogglingly absurd scene on the bridge when the fat kid gets tortured that illustrates my point. The bullying itself is so far-fetched I could write an essay just on that, but it's the reaction of the adults who witness this that's very telling. A car passes by yet the couple in it don't stop to help. That's a reflection not of typical small-town "hick" behaviour - as "progressive liberal" King would have us believe - but a projection of King's own personality. He would never stop to help a kid who was in danger, and yet, like a mega-hypocrite, he portrays Bible-Belt people this way.
Why? Aside from his evident misanthropy, their religiousness is the main reason. Even though he grew up in rural America, in a tiny hamlet in fact, his attitude is firmly entrenched in the stereotypical urban East/West coast "all middle America are dumb evil hicks" mentality. Perhaps if he’d grown up in a large West or East Coast city he would have hated city folk just as much? I believe he might have.
Almost every story he's ever written shows a pathological hatred of Christians and/or small-town U.S. inhabitants in general. I am not a fan of Christianity either, but I have the common sense to look at faith realistically, not as a pompous atheist would. He generalizes too much (generalizing: that thing liberals supposedly hate - except when they do it). King makes ISIS terrorists look like infants by comparison. The way he treats all his Christian characters, you would think he was born in the 16th century right smack in the middle of the Inquisition, that he'd been tortured in a dark dungeon for years.
King may even be a sociopath, or at the very least a borderline case. Such high levels of intolerance and malice fall squarely into the realm of pathological extremism. Seeing interviews with him only confirmed these suspicions.
What's with the absurd levels of bullying in this awful movie? King, who appears to be a mega-nerd loser, must have been bullied as a kid, but I am pretty sure nobody cut up his stomach, or punched him in the face repeatedly as in a gangster movie, or kicked him violently in his empty head, or threw his X-legged body off a bridge and then chased his sorry liberal ass with a knife, or tried to run him over with a car, or threatened to slice him up, and so on. These kids behave worse than the cannibal clans all in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies! They're literally like mini-me's of hillbilly hick characters from Rob Zombie’s trash flicks. I have rarely seen such an absurd portrayal of school kids. This story literally takes place in some weird parallel dimension, despite this never being King's intention. (Results and intentions rarely match, certainly when you're a shit writer.)
King is in constant overkill mode in everything he writes, because he is such a hick in terms of subtlety. His idea of scary is to have a clown laugh like a moron, or a monster to open his mouth and scream, because his approach is deeply rooted in trite horror cliches. He's an amateur. Yet worshiped by millions of cretins who actually have the patience to read all that 1000-page cheap shit.
Take the opening segment, for example. The kid doesn't get spooked at all by seeing a deranged clown in the sewer. Anyone - regardless of age and mental abilities - would be at the very least shocked by such an occurrence. This unrealistic kingsian kid is calm, friendly even to the clown, and lulled into placing his entire hand inside the hole - which so predictably ends up poorly for him. A parallel universe, not Earth, just as I mentioned earlier.
Or the stupid reaction of the ginger girl upon hearing "eerie" voices from the sink. Is she spooked, even remotely? Does she run screaming? Does she show even a trace of fear? She reacts as if hearing voices from the sink was as normal as buying a CD.
(A New Kids On The Block CD, as the case may be here. Why didn't they just update them to One Direction? It was 2017. Sticking religiously to the original is a bonehead move: as if this story were so intrinsically connected to the 90s that it couldn't be set in any other era! But that's a very minor point.)
Neither kids nor adults behave in logical, rational or in a natural i.e. believable way. Every older character is either a sexual deviant, a glue-sniffer, a violent sadist, or an alien from planet Zong. That the older kids are almost more evil than the clown is a pretty bonehead move, it's mindless overkill. Just as comedy becomes unfunny when it veers too far into farcical territory, similarly horror films lose their scariness when they go too far, risking becoming comical or just plain dull. The secret to horror film success are moderation, mood and timing - words King probably can't even spell.
Most movies based on King's material are garbage, so his popularity is a pretty fascinating phenomenon, very telling of where contemporary western civilization stands culturally and intellectually. Trash sells. Trash pretty much dominates all areas of "art". People who think there are no better horror writers than Stevie King are gullible, misinformed retards, and quite possibly buy a lot of glue.
The media itself has a huge hand in pushing his career, simply because he is "politically correct" i.e. represents everything that the ruling Establishment propagates. He is an anti-rebel hence is rewarded by having his shoddy product defended by liars and relentlessly promoted by hypocrites. Similarly to the reasons why rap "music" gets such ridiculous amounts of hype from those same people. Anybody know any right-wing horror authors with remotely the kind of commercial success King enjoys? Precisely my point. His political orientation is key to his long-term success, not his imaginary talent. Very similar to Picasso, who also built his "legend" purely based on his politics.
Other dumb things:
1. We never find out why adults aren't targeted. Are evil clowns scared of them?
2. The ginger girl. Her character is the most absurd of all. Nothing even remotely rings true about anything she says or does. Has King ever even MET a young female in his life? He must have... or?
3. Where are the fat kid's parents? He gets his stomach carved up, yet there are no repercussions.
4. The school bullies (who behave much more like an adult sadistic gang than kids) never get arrested, questioned, detained - because OBVIOUSLY all small-town adults are disinterested bystanders who don't give a hoot about their own kids.
5. The ROCK WAR sequence is really too dumb for words.
6. King treats his audience as morons who need everything spelled out to them, which is why he gets one of the nerd kids to spell out for us that they are the "Losers Club". Because clearly we're too dim to figure out that extremely obvious fact on our own.
7. Nerds are either fat, have thick glasses, suffer from asthma, or stutter violently. No cliche is too predictable or too boring for King to use.
8. This trash lasts well over two hours, which breaks the golden rule that horror films and comedies should almost never be longer than 90 minutes. Sitting through so much rubbish is a chore. It took me 5-6 sittings to finally finish watching this junk.
9. During the abandoned hut attack, all the kids are screaming "gotta get outta here" yet none of them do.
10. 12 year-olds know about straightening out twisted bones.
11. How come the adults don't see the effects of the carnage? Another thing unexplained.
12. Everyone in small-town America are racists who hate blacks - except a small select group of nerds. Because nerds are never racist, but "hicks" are. Great logic.
13. Torture and murder of children and cats. What's next? Paraplegics? King doesn't know how to create real horror/terror so he resorts to sadistic, explicit torture of the weakest.
14. Every single adult is irresponsible, selfish, insane, evil or violent. That's because they're not from Frisco or New York where, as we all know, people are all sophisticated and civilized. People from Middle America are trash - according to Stevie King, the bleedin'-heart liberal who hates humanity. (He probably hates the East/West coast "sophistos" too, but it doesn't fit into his political worldview to mock or vilify them. Plus he knows Hollywood wouldn't approve of that, and he wants to remain employed - and rich.)
15. The ginger girl says "I'm not afraid of you" and the clown confirms this by finding no scent of fear on her. But how can she possibly not be afraid of a demonic clown? Everyone would be. She'd have to be either batshit crazy not to fear him, or utterly stupid. So much for King's very flimsy attempt at "girl power".
16. As usual, King isn't content to have just one villainous force; some of the film's humans are just as bad as the evil clown. Hence the movie becomes a cluster-fuck of ideas. He'd done this in many other stories, such as Langoliers (major cluster-fuck) and Tommyknockers (ultra-cluster-fuck of a plot).
17. The kids are not only unrealistic, they're also very boring.
18. Fat kid brings back ginger girl by KISSING her. Not only is the scene absurd and repulsive, it is horribly cliche: "the power of love always wins." Stevie has no shame.
19. And may I once again remind you all of the hilarious contradictions that unify nearly all Stephen King stories: on the one hand he hates and mocks religious folk - yet he always includes supernatural events in his films. So if the supernatural exists, then why is it stupid to believe in God? See, King hasn't thought this through at all. He is such a trashy author, he can't even get the very basics right.
We know that Stephen King is the undeclared Master of Garbage, but why exactly are his films so unscary? The simple answer is because almost none of them ring true. The characters aren't rooted in any kind of reality. They're supposed to show humans in familiar surroundings facing unfamiliar obstacles, but these "familiar" surroundings are anything but: they're so absurd that they're barely even human, too caricatured to be taken seriously as real people. King's primitive take on humanity is on the level of a comic book drawn by a small, dumb, aggressive child. The protagonists in his stories are misfits, buffoons, cretins, lunatics. Most are either mentally unbalanced or just plain evil - and that's just the victims! They're so over-the-top hence unrealistic that it doesn't matter what happens to them. I can't get into a story that badly conceived. Very little rings true. In which part of the universe do children talk and behave this way? The characters physically resemble kids, and that alone is enough for King's dumb fans.
King's grasp of human psychology is that of an alien, and one with handicapped intellectual faculties. He doesn't understand people hence how is he supposed to make his idiotic characters act like actual people? Part of that confusion is doubtlessly based in his very obvious misanthropy. Very few of his stories have a clear moral stance, most don't even have a moral compass, and he has no intelligent point to make, ever – unless you consider standard liberal propaganda bullshit to be an “intelligent point”. His stories are sometimes a series of pointless, loosely connected sadistic murders, and it's not far-fetched to presume that writing those scenes gives him tremendous joy, on a visceral, purely sadistic level. (I am not saying other horror writers are like this, I am saying he is.) Ironically, like so many Hollywood liberal douchebags, he actually deeply hates the human race, and not just in a general or vague way the way some of us do.
King probably detests himself too. There is ample evidence that his narcissism is paradoxically mixed with a self-loathing typical of political extremists. And make no mistake, he is a political extremist, not just a middle-of-the-road liberal buffoon. His treatment of conservatives and especially religious people (i.e. those who dare hold views that differ from his own) isn't light-hearted, clever or controlled: it is unsubtle, primitive and full of barely restrained bile. He hammers home his point about religious folk being dumb and evil with all the subtlety of a 16-ton hammer crushing a child's head. His "social satire" is no satire at all, it's far too simplistic and base to be considered anything of the sort. His obvious hatred of small-town America reveals his arrogance just as it is revealing of his sense of intellectual and moral superiority toward said demographic.
The reason I chose a child's head getting smashed as an analogy is because the movie has the poor taste to open with the brutal crippling of a very young child. King has no boundaries, which is further proof of his moral bankruptcy, and he'd probably write snuff novels about paraplegics getting their bodies chopped up into tiny pieces (and then served to cannibals) if only his publishers would allow it. (These publishers wouldn't mind such material, but western society isn't quite there... yet.) There is a reason why we very rarely see little children get decapitated in movies: because it is tasteless. Making a tasteless movie is the easiest thing in the world; just ask Maryland's most useless man ever, John Waters. The tough part is making a scary movie without resorting to snuffisms. Only gifted film-makers and writers can pull that off.
There is that mind-bogglingly absurd scene on the bridge when the fat kid gets tortured that illustrates my point. The bullying itself is so far-fetched I could write an essay just on that, but it's the reaction of the adults who witness this that's very telling. A car passes by yet the couple in it don't stop to help. That's a reflection not of typical small-town "hick" behaviour - as "progressive liberal" King would have us believe - but a projection of King's own personality. He would never stop to help a kid who was in danger, and yet, like a mega-hypocrite, he portrays Bible-Belt people this way.
Why? Aside from his evident misanthropy, their religiousness is the main reason. Even though he grew up in rural America, in a tiny hamlet in fact, his attitude is firmly entrenched in the stereotypical urban East/West coast "all middle America are dumb evil hicks" mentality. Perhaps if he’d grown up in a large West or East Coast city he would have hated city folk just as much? I believe he might have.
Almost every story he's ever written shows a pathological hatred of Christians and/or small-town U.S. inhabitants in general. I am not a fan of Christianity either, but I have the common sense to look at faith realistically, not as a pompous atheist would. He generalizes too much (generalizing: that thing liberals supposedly hate - except when they do it). King makes ISIS terrorists look like infants by comparison. The way he treats all his Christian characters, you would think he was born in the 16th century right smack in the middle of the Inquisition, that he'd been tortured in a dark dungeon for years.
King may even be a sociopath, or at the very least a borderline case. Such high levels of intolerance and malice fall squarely into the realm of pathological extremism. Seeing interviews with him only confirmed these suspicions.
What's with the absurd levels of bullying in this awful movie? King, who appears to be a mega-nerd loser, must have been bullied as a kid, but I am pretty sure nobody cut up his stomach, or punched him in the face repeatedly as in a gangster movie, or kicked him violently in his empty head, or threw his X-legged body off a bridge and then chased his sorry liberal ass with a knife, or tried to run him over with a car, or threatened to slice him up, and so on. These kids behave worse than the cannibal clans all in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies! They're literally like mini-me's of hillbilly hick characters from Rob Zombie’s trash flicks. I have rarely seen such an absurd portrayal of school kids. This story literally takes place in some weird parallel dimension, despite this never being King's intention. (Results and intentions rarely match, certainly when you're a shit writer.)
King is in constant overkill mode in everything he writes, because he is such a hick in terms of subtlety. His idea of scary is to have a clown laugh like a moron, or a monster to open his mouth and scream, because his approach is deeply rooted in trite horror cliches. He's an amateur. Yet worshiped by millions of cretins who actually have the patience to read all that 1000-page cheap shit.
Take the opening segment, for example. The kid doesn't get spooked at all by seeing a deranged clown in the sewer. Anyone - regardless of age and mental abilities - would be at the very least shocked by such an occurrence. This unrealistic kingsian kid is calm, friendly even to the clown, and lulled into placing his entire hand inside the hole - which so predictably ends up poorly for him. A parallel universe, not Earth, just as I mentioned earlier.
Or the stupid reaction of the ginger girl upon hearing "eerie" voices from the sink. Is she spooked, even remotely? Does she run screaming? Does she show even a trace of fear? She reacts as if hearing voices from the sink was as normal as buying a CD.
(A New Kids On The Block CD, as the case may be here. Why didn't they just update them to One Direction? It was 2017. Sticking religiously to the original is a bonehead move: as if this story were so intrinsically connected to the 90s that it couldn't be set in any other era! But that's a very minor point.)
Neither kids nor adults behave in logical, rational or in a natural i.e. believable way. Every older character is either a sexual deviant, a glue-sniffer, a violent sadist, or an alien from planet Zong. That the older kids are almost more evil than the clown is a pretty bonehead move, it's mindless overkill. Just as comedy becomes unfunny when it veers too far into farcical territory, similarly horror films lose their scariness when they go too far, risking becoming comical or just plain dull. The secret to horror film success are moderation, mood and timing - words King probably can't even spell.
Most movies based on King's material are garbage, so his popularity is a pretty fascinating phenomenon, very telling of where contemporary western civilization stands culturally and intellectually. Trash sells. Trash pretty much dominates all areas of "art". People who think there are no better horror writers than Stevie King are gullible, misinformed retards, and quite possibly buy a lot of glue.
The media itself has a huge hand in pushing his career, simply because he is "politically correct" i.e. represents everything that the ruling Establishment propagates. He is an anti-rebel hence is rewarded by having his shoddy product defended by liars and relentlessly promoted by hypocrites. Similarly to the reasons why rap "music" gets such ridiculous amounts of hype from those same people. Anybody know any right-wing horror authors with remotely the kind of commercial success King enjoys? Precisely my point. His political orientation is key to his long-term success, not his imaginary talent. Very similar to Picasso, who also built his "legend" purely based on his politics.
Other dumb things:
1. We never find out why adults aren't targeted. Are evil clowns scared of them?
2. The ginger girl. Her character is the most absurd of all. Nothing even remotely rings true about anything she says or does. Has King ever even MET a young female in his life? He must have... or?
3. Where are the fat kid's parents? He gets his stomach carved up, yet there are no repercussions.
4. The school bullies (who behave much more like an adult sadistic gang than kids) never get arrested, questioned, detained - because OBVIOUSLY all small-town adults are disinterested bystanders who don't give a hoot about their own kids.
5. The ROCK WAR sequence is really too dumb for words.
6. King treats his audience as morons who need everything spelled out to them, which is why he gets one of the nerd kids to spell out for us that they are the "Losers Club". Because clearly we're too dim to figure out that extremely obvious fact on our own.
7. Nerds are either fat, have thick glasses, suffer from asthma, or stutter violently. No cliche is too predictable or too boring for King to use.
8. This trash lasts well over two hours, which breaks the golden rule that horror films and comedies should almost never be longer than 90 minutes. Sitting through so much rubbish is a chore. It took me 5-6 sittings to finally finish watching this junk.
9. During the abandoned hut attack, all the kids are screaming "gotta get outta here" yet none of them do.
10. 12 year-olds know about straightening out twisted bones.
11. How come the adults don't see the effects of the carnage? Another thing unexplained.
12. Everyone in small-town America are racists who hate blacks - except a small select group of nerds. Because nerds are never racist, but "hicks" are. Great logic.
13. Torture and murder of children and cats. What's next? Paraplegics? King doesn't know how to create real horror/terror so he resorts to sadistic, explicit torture of the weakest.
14. Every single adult is irresponsible, selfish, insane, evil or violent. That's because they're not from Frisco or New York where, as we all know, people are all sophisticated and civilized. People from Middle America are trash - according to Stevie King, the bleedin'-heart liberal who hates humanity. (He probably hates the East/West coast "sophistos" too, but it doesn't fit into his political worldview to mock or vilify them. Plus he knows Hollywood wouldn't approve of that, and he wants to remain employed - and rich.)
15. The ginger girl says "I'm not afraid of you" and the clown confirms this by finding no scent of fear on her. But how can she possibly not be afraid of a demonic clown? Everyone would be. She'd have to be either batshit crazy not to fear him, or utterly stupid. So much for King's very flimsy attempt at "girl power".
16. As usual, King isn't content to have just one villainous force; some of the film's humans are just as bad as the evil clown. Hence the movie becomes a cluster-fuck of ideas. He'd done this in many other stories, such as Langoliers (major cluster-fuck) and Tommyknockers (ultra-cluster-fuck of a plot).
17. The kids are not only unrealistic, they're also very boring.
18. Fat kid brings back ginger girl by KISSING her. Not only is the scene absurd and repulsive, it is horribly cliche: "the power of love always wins." Stevie has no shame.
19. And may I once again remind you all of the hilarious contradictions that unify nearly all Stephen King stories: on the one hand he hates and mocks religious folk - yet he always includes supernatural events in his films. So if the supernatural exists, then why is it stupid to believe in God? See, King hasn't thought this through at all. He is such a trashy author, he can't even get the very basics right.
