Guilty Pleasures #48 - IT part 2 (A Strange Halloween)

Derry Maine is a dark town
It has its ups, and has its clowns
But when 7 kids enter the fray
They'll face their fears and save the day

Years have passed since the creature was slain
And now they must face their fears again
For the truth of the creature is yet unseen
IT has returned on a Strange Halloween

Last time on IT… You got the decent part of this mini-series, now for the weird part. Let’s dive into the second part of IT.

Bill is the first to arrive in Derry, right next to a graveyard, including one, of course, for his younger brother. He wonders how he could’ve forgotten and yeah, that’s a good question. He sees Pennywise telling him to choose his own grave. How charming. Of course seconds later it’s all gone. Bill arrives and finds Mike at the library, he notices a few of his books are on display, national pride or something?

Mike is the only one to remember because he’s never left Derry… yeah, sure, why not? Mike shows Bill his old bike. And now time for some prophecy cr*p, he bought the bike, which has a flat tyre, but he bought a tyre repair kit 3 months prior on impulse. Bill has a flashback, but we’ll get to what the hell it’s supposed to be later.

Richie arrives next and heads to the Library where Mike isn’t and of course Pennywise is in the library and makes balloons rain down on the people, frightening, and they’re full of red paint. As Richie tries to talk his way out, Pennywise becomes louder and begins telling jokes, as this is Tim Curry at his… I think best? Definitely strangest? Wa-ha Wa-ha Wa-ha!!

He warns Richie to leave and he drives off, and Bill has mended his bike and has memories of riding it with Mike back in the day. He also begins riding it in the present, Mike also has a pack of cards Pennywise is on the back of them. Look we spent the whole last half of this mini series getting the group back together, can we hurry this along?

Next into town is Ben and he pulls over taxi back near the river they used to meet at. He begins exploring and sees a bunch of other kids heading his way, he flashes back to being chased by the bullies and it turns out it’s a less psychotic version of the same thing. Ben goes to help the kid, and flashes back to or possibly experiences it in the present, I’m not sure, seeing his father as a zombie near the house. One jumpscare later and he’s back in the taxi

He sees Pennywise on the side of the road, and a balloon appears in the car, telling him to turn back. Eddie arrives, and flashes back to the pharmacy, where the pharmacist tells him his asthma medication is a placebo, which explains why it didn’t kill the others when they took a shot. Apparently, the pharmacist is still there in the present, wanting cigars and does seem to remember him, but then he grabs Eddie’s arm and sounds like Pennywise.

So, leaving Derry caused him to forget about the placebo medicine, that is a 100 times creepier than any clown is. And Bev arrives at her old house, and sees ‘Marsh’ on the doorbell, but she finds out her father’s been dead for 5 years and sees it’s actually ‘Kersh’ written on the doorbell. Mrs Kersh invites her in for tea and heads into the bathroom, nothing exactly scary happens, but time seems to pass weirdly for her. Later she has tea and whilst ‘Mrs Kersh’ drinks it down in seconds, Bev finds her cup filled with blood. Yup, turns out Mrs Kersh is in fact Pennywise, she makes a run for it, and is nearly run down by a truck, when she looks back towards the house it’s boarded up. And a balloon shows up again… ok….

OK, so cut back to Bill’s wife, who’s worried as hell about him. He’s talking to a movie guy who’s seems to love her also, and is secretly, though not subtly, hoping this incident tears them apart. She asks for a few days and he says no, threatening to bring everything crashing down if she does so. None the less, she books herself on a flight. This is never resolved by the way.

So, we’re past the 20-minute mark, let’s finally have them reunite. It’s amazing they all recognise each other frankly, a lot of them aren’t similar-looking to their child counterparts, and I don’t mean that as a criticism of the casting, that’s just what happens when nearly 30 years pass. Bev arrives and quickly passes out. Eddie still barely remembers anything until… he does, well that was 2 minutes wasted, carry on.

Not wanting to immediately bring in the danger, especially after their unpleasant memories returning they decide to have some food and a few drinks. Catch up on old memories, be immature and a perfect chance for a song number. Turns out Henry for some reason confessed to all the murders and is now in a mental hospital.

Speaking of, Pennywise contacts him through the moon and it’s implied now that he was helping Pennywise, even though there was no interaction between them at all. Pennywise tells them to kill all the Losers club, who’ve been scared out of the restaurant by some creepy fortune cookies. OK…

So, about Stan, he was barely even a thing in the last half of this and he killed himself rather than showing up in this half. Richie begins joking about it, although he may possibly be drunk and obvious payoff in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1… Oh yeah, he’s dead. Bill remembers the one full grave from. Bill fills us in on Stan’s encounter with Pennywise and we’re into the stupid again. He enters an abandoned house that looks nothing like the other one so I presume it’s different and encounters… a mummy? And get this. All he could do is hold his book out like a shield and list all the birds he can remember… and this works because…

Eddie then says that Stan told him he managed to get a closer look at what Pennywise in, he looked into its deadlights, huh? Out of the fridge comes more scary as f*ck balloons and Stan’s head is in the fridge. I don’t know why I’m not frightened except for the fact that it’s not frightening. Maybe it’s the ‘I’m going to pass wind’ expression he’s making. Follow this up by inserting all the generic haunted house scares at once, which they beat by joining hands.

The moon goes down at about 50 times the speed it should be and one of Henry’s fellow bullies shows up to break him out of prison. The one guard shows up but Pennywise jumps out of his clown suit as a dog to attack. I'm not kidding

Mike informs the others that IT comes by every 30 years and it usually culminates in some kind of disaster. The grown ups aren’t interested in looking for IT and would rather forget. Or it could just be that they don’t see them as connected. But no, some old geezer didn’t help Bev when Henry was fiddling with her hair so all adults must be complicit, that makes much more sense

More prophecy cr*p as Bill’s wife arrives, and Pennywise is waiting for her, with a degree of lust in Its eyes? So, how did Ben end up losing weight… I mean, I know you’re interested. Apparently he did it to show up a coach who laughed at him, trained so hard he beat the best and got punched in the face for his trouble, the coach then lost his job. Next, what we really needed to find out was that when Bev cleaned up the blood it came back again, so the losers club came and helped her clear it up again, and it didn’t come back. Go team!

Mike heads up to his hotel room and finds the window unlocked, Henry has found his way inside and stabs him in the chest. Ben and Bev meet up in her room and oh you have got to be kidding me, it’s taken all the way to now for her to work out it was Ben who sent her that note? Or, she claims she’s always known, all evidence to the contrary. Or it turns out it was Pennywise the entire time, and they were kissing… moving on…

Eddie and Ben get Henry off Mike, and somehow that leads to Henry stabbing himself. They cram into a convertible and take him to a hospital and I guess no-ones gonna notice the dead body in his room. And we get one of the worst delivered lines I’ve heard yet as Bev seriously asks ‘why is it so mean?’ no-one could make that line sound good, but this actress really didn’t.

Bev confesses her rather complicated romantic situation and it’s NOW she realises that Ben wrote that f*cking poem.

Mike’s gonna survive but his injury means he’s out of the picture for now. He reveals he’s still carrying those silver earrings they didn’t use against IT before. He’d gone down to the sewers alone when he was feeling suicidal. I can think of simpler ways to off yourself, like the way Stan chose but...

So they decide to leave Henry lying on the floor, dead in the room, thinking getting the town involved would end badly. Most decide to head their separate ways but Bill needs to get the job done, else the conflict would end up driving him insane. Bev and Ben join first, with Eddie reluctantly joining third and Richie ultimately also agreeing to go.

So armed with only the finest tool of a slingshot and some silver earrings they head back to the old creepy sewers. The first thing they find is Bill’s wife’s handbag, which is not pleasing for Bill and causes him to rush out on his own, thankfully Bill slips up and the others catch up. They arrive in the chamber they fought It before. Bill sees a vision of Georgie, blaming Bill for sending him out in the rain where It killed him. The others convince him to fight back and Georgie disappear.

After another interesting Tim Curry performance, Bill places the boat back down, and they follow it, finding a doorway in the sewer tunnels. OK… Eddie decides now is the time to confess about his sex life… he’s a virgin, I care so much… So they head through the door and find themselves face to face with the true form of It, brace yourselves folks, the movie’s been building up to this the whole time.

Hahahahaha it’s just… Steven King, you know… it’s a giant spider. And it looks f*cking awful. Bev fires her shots but they both miss and IT uses its deadlights to freeze Bill, Ben and Richie in place, Eddie tries the battery acid trick again but it doesn’t work and he ends up in IT’s clutches, Bev finds one of the earings and fires it into the deadlights, Eddie is knocked out but the others beat the sh*t out of IT to make sure IT stays dead this time. Bill goes back to find his wife and a few other (less important/alive) victims descending, but she’s still entranced.

So, time to conclude. Eddie has suddenly decided to join Richie as a comedian for some reason. Ben and Bev left Derry together, and had a wife and child. As for Bill, well his wife is still comatose but he decides to take his bike out for one last spin with her on it… and it works, although holding up some traffic in the process.

And thus ends 3 hours of my life invested in this…

The second half is the weaker half, it feels much more padded and bloated than the first half, with them feeling the need to add bits that should’ve just been in the initial flashbacks. The acting is sub-par but not unbearable, with the exception of Tim Curry who is an absolute riot, catching the goofier side of the homicidal clown.

Rating -12%

But be back next week, as we look at actual movie based on the actual first half of this mini-series.