Thanks, I Hate It: IT

IT: Part 1, the recent Andrés Muschietti-helmed adaptation of Stephen King's seminal thousand-plus page horror novel, is perfectly good fare for a sleepover filled with 13-15-year-olds. In spite of its intermittent corniness it manages to capture at times the wild and wordless feeling of teetering on a knife's edge between childhood and adolescence, but that same place of uneasy sexual awakening is also where Muschietti's movie falls apart. IT's fatal flaw is its sexlessness, not just in the absence of the source material's pivotal and, one imagines, brutally difficult to adapt preteen sex scene but in the sterile, vintage-clothed body of its titular monster. The creature, so earthily raunchy and repulsive in both King's novel and as played by Tim Curry in the 1990 TV miniseries, is here a tidy, bright-voiced menace that feels inimical to the very idea of genitalia.

Had the film set the book's ideas about sexuality aside it might have found a richer life for itself as a more divergent adaptation, but in trying to hew closer to its source material while periodically averting its eyes from one of its central themes it hobbles itself in every respect. The clown, a capering imp in tights and a doublet, is rendered generic by the film's unwillingness to embrace its own nastiness. The belabored enunciation actor Bill Skarsgård employs when taunting or enticing prey is the kind of faux-scary shit that plays substitute for genuine presence. His bobblehead physique makes him look like a Kewpie doll owned by one of the Addams children.

The foley work is another major stumble, a bunch of generic buzzing and spooky whispers any of which would be right at home on a supernatural NBC procedural about fairy tale characters solving crimes. Even the film's strongest scenes -- Eddie's (Jack Dylan Grazer) encounter with the leper (Javier Botet), bully Henry Bowers' (Nicholas Hamilton) humiliation at his father's hands -- are undercut by lazy sound effects. The curtailing of the kids' home lives, too, robs their relationships with their parents of much of their power and purpose, and the fat suit worn by Eddie's mother Sonia (Mollie Atkinson) is both repellently fake and an added layer of hateful revulsion on an already deeply fatphobic character. The effects do have their high points, the aforementioned leper chief among them, but their final showcase is dismally bog-standard, the fight with the creature sanded down from a vicious contest of souls and wills to a bunch of kids beating a scary clown with bats.

The novel Muschietti's film adapts is baggy, imperfect, riddled with King's oblivious racism and painful fatphobia, and unquestionably one of the greatest works of horror ever written. Its white-hot and discomfiting insights into child abuse and sexual coming of age remain both difficult to touch and deeply, elementally true. The movie's lukewarm scenes of abuse and discussions of missing kids can't begin to compare. Muschietti's IT is fine. A little lazy, a little underbaked, but a reasonably competent campfire horror movie. What it isn't, what it's too frightened to so much as try to be, is IT.