'Brutal, Bloody & Bonkers': Why You'll Love The 'IT' Sequel

IT CHAPTER 2

★★★

IT Chapter Two is better than 2017’s It. It’s better because it’s far more bizarre, brutal, bloody, and bonkers. It’s less concerned with the clichés of smalltown Americana, of losers and bullies; and with being a teen friendly morality play. Instead, director Andy Muschietti steers hard into the most grotesque elements of Stephen King’s doorstop novel.

With its bountiful body horror, bizarre creatures, a collapsing of reality and surreality, and its deep dive plunges into the realm of night terrors and nightmares, IT features few of the cheesy jump scares of its predecessor. In fact, it feels wholly different to a regular horror movie. Rather than resembling the horror movie’s rollercoaster ride of anticipation, terror, and cathartic, joyous release, strapping in for the ride is more submitting to something grotesque and unnerving, Chapter Two summoning a deeply unpleasant feeling that never recedes.

Stuffed into this overstuffed movie are hate crimes, things lurking beneath the surface (repressed desires/trauma, dark basements, even darker sewers), moments intercutting present and past, projectile vomit, cameos for Stephen King and Peter Bogdanovich, meta storytelling self reference, a giant Paul Bunyan statue, all manner of ultra-long tongues, mulleted zombie bullies, de-aged Finn Wolfhard, demented fun houses and halls of mirrors, a microdosed bad trip, and a kooky Native American ritual.

It’s a lot, both literally and figuratively. At an eye-popping (and ass-numbing) 170 minutes, IT Chapter Two is probably way more than anyone would ever want from a creepy clown popcorn movie.

But, by the time it reaches its overdriven, over-the-top, near-operatic climax, there’s something to be admired in just how willing Muschietti is, this time, to go for it. After the elementary filmmaking, paper thin characterisation, instructive score, and unearned sentimentality of the first flick, this Side B culminates in an underground cavern where a strobing blue light bathes everything in a singular colour. Soon thereafter, the palette shifts to entirely green, and the influence of the hyper stylisation and giddy excess of Italian gialli is palpable.

Perhaps, Muschietti feels a sense of freedom in adapting the ‘adult’ parts of King’s novel. 27 years after the story from the first film, the kids of the Losers Club return to the nightmare of Smalltown America — proudly worn intolerance, violent society, the death of Main Street, repository of dark secrets — in what’s, at first, like a dramatic class reunion (though the story’s set in the contemporary day, apparently no one stalked any of the others on the internet). Their childhood characters have been updated, and largely left unchanged: Wolfhard has turned into Bill Hader, who is essentially playing the same bespectacled shit talker. Amongst the main-gang ensemble there’s names A List (Hader, James McAvoy, Jessica Chastain) and B (Neighbours graduate Jay Ryan, Old Spice ad dude Isaiah Mustafa, Ziggy from The Wire James Ransone); the presence of the starrier cast coming on the back of the unexpected super success of It.

The band has gotten back together to battle, once more, with the otherworldly evil entity known as It, whose most famous manifestation is as Pennywise The Clown. Bill Skarsgård is still stuck playing this shape shifting creature from deep in some digital backlot, and the elasticity of his CGI form again robs the audience of some of the simple pleasures of a man (in a drain) in greasepaint. It’s no coincidence that one of the creepiest sights in the film comes when he’s applying his make-up, putting on a creepy clown mask as if preparing for a performance (and to terrify).

Now that the kids are all grown up, there’s no need for a clown to lure them, though; and the ‘personal’ nature of their horrors often feel like discrete sequences, the gang going their separate ways so they can see their own separate nightmares. Where this trope was at play in It, with Chapter Two, Muschietti can take things to more ludicrous, comic, phantasmagoric, or gory ends.

This suits a film whose pursuit of goofy grotesquerie or horror image extravagance is its best quality. Of course, it’s faint praise acclaiming a movie whose best attributes are that it’s calamitous, ridiculous, turned up to 11. In such, there’s often a cacophonous quality, and some viewers will certainly see IT Chapter Two as a work of tonal incoherence. But, in the world of obligatory sequels to shitty originals, you take what you can get.