ANNIHILATION

            Although this is a science fiction film, it would make an interesting double-bill with The Ritual, which is unashamedly a horror film.  This concerns a group of women lost in a savage wilderness, with purpose and motivation; that concerns a group of men lost in a wilderness, by accident, with no purpose and no clue.  It’s interesting to compare and contrast how they cope.

            But, to establish its enlightened science fiction credentials, before it sinks into the darkness of horror, the film’s first image is of a cell dividing.  Biologist Lena (Natalie Portman) tells us that four billion years ago, all life began with one cell, alone, utterly by itself, dividing and doubling, then re-doubling, and so on.

            All life, she reminds us, animal and vegetable, is related.  Funny how no film has clocked that before.  We have had biomechanical monsters, but have we ever had biovegetable monsters before?  I don’t think even Cronenberg - who was obsessed with monsters spreading and growing like cancer - made that leap.  Thinking it through, in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 and again in 1978 ... I ignore the subsequent versions), those aliens were vegetables, but the films don’t really dwell on that aspect of the invasion.  They concentrate instead on the existential notion of a human being replaced by an identical copy and the paranoia of not knowing who is or isn’t real. 

            Annihilation also wanders fairly quickly into that territory, when Lena’s husband returns, but is subtly changed, less emotional, less human.  He’s also been missing for a year and she’d presumed him dead.  So she had lost the one she loved.  Like Katherine Waterstone’s character in Alien Covenant (2017).  Like in Amy Adams’ character in Arrival (2016).  Why is it that boy protagonists in F&SF films are lost, but girl protagonists have lost? 

            When she touches her reappeared husband’s hand, we get the first of many subtle visual metaphors ... Their hands are seen distorted through a glass of water - a medium which warps and distorts - like The Shimmer, which takes life and alters it, changes its shape and breaks down its barriers.

            The Shimmer is an area of disturbed and distorted land around the site of a crashed meteor.  The area is described as possibly “a higher dimension?” - a veil which passes through to another dimension, possibly.  This is a notion that viewers will be familiar with thanks to Stranger Things, but (as with everything else on that show) it comes from somewhere else.  You could argue that the wardrobe (or the pools) in the Narnia books are gateways to other dimensions ... But I think it is really H.P. Lovecraft we are leaning towards here.  His open doorways are to other dimensions, and should have been kept shut.  Because, in those Lovecraft dimensions ... There be monsters!

            We are told that the military / scientific garrison encamped next to The Shimmer, have sent in people and drones - and nothing has come back.  But the film’s framing device has told us that Lena gets back - so we know the dénouement of this story going in!  Like a lot of science fiction, this is a why film, not a what film.  It wants us to think about the underlying cause of what we see, not just to sit and let events wash over us.

            It speaks to the ambition of this film that the scenes of the soldier scientists travelling through the alien wilderness, are set in broad daylight, and yet are still deeply creepy.  We’ve all seen groups of male soldiers creeping through wilderness - from Deliverance (1972) and Southern Comfort (1981), to Platoon (1986) and Predator (1987), but simply making the soldiers women makes the whole thing seem more unusual and unique.  That said, the sequence when one of their number goes mad and starts brandishing a gun, is undeniably reminiscent of Bill Paxton’s turn in Aliens (1986).  But, I think, Garfield is aware of these precedents.  At one point they find a mini-gun and one of the soldier scientists (played by Gina Rodriguez) picks it up, then announces:  “This shit is heavy ... Can’t carry this”.  She isn’t Vasquez ... She doesn’t feel like she has anything macho to prove.

The gang's all here: Arnie, Carl Weathers ... Sorry, I mean:  Michael Biehn, Bill Paxton ... No, wait:  Jennifer Jason Leigh, Natalie Portman, Tuva Novotny, Tessa Thompson and Gina Ridriguez.  Lock 'n' load, ladies.

             The author of the original Annihilation book, Jeff VanderMeer, says that he hadn’t seen Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) when he wrote his novel, it isn’t a deliberate influence.  I don’t think he can lay claim to being unaware of Lovecraft’s Colour out of Space (1927), mind; which concerns a meteor which crashes to earth, bringing alien life with it, which poisons a huge area of farm land known as ‘the blasted heath’, wherein animals and plants mutate.  In the novel Roadside Picnic, which Stalker is loosely based upon, it is made clear (clearer than in the film), that ‘the zone’ was created by aliens.

            So, adapter and director, Alex Garland has clearly seen a lot of Tarkovsky ... Lena’s flashbacks to happy times with hubby have the feel of Solaris (1972), and the its flashbacks impinged on the subjective reality of the present.  The scenes of the soldier scientists treading lightly through the wilderness have the feel of Stalker ... Particularly in terms  of the eerie sounds that fill the air. Of course, Tarkovsky’s toxic landscape was real, not created with careful CGI as here.  The cancers that grew in the bodies of Tarkovsky’s crew, including the director, himself, were reputedly developed because of the exposure to the chemical waste in those corrupt industrial environments. 

            The notion of cancer as a simple product of cell reproduction gone wrong, is a thread that runs through the fabric of this film.  During one of the dreamy flashbacks, we are told that seeing the Moon in the daylight feels like God made a mistake.  Her husband is religious, where she isn’t, and insists that God doesn’t make mistakes.  She promptly gives him an example - telling him that ageing is a mistake that a cell makes - correct the mistake and we’ll never age!  The point of this story is to plant the notion that our matter, our DNA, is editable, reprogrammable and, therefore, the stuff of which we’re made can be altered.  That is an important idea that underscores what we are seeing in The Shimmer.

            Plants are mutating, different species on the same vine, vivid multi-coloured molds are growing on the trees.  Lena describes the way the organisms grow on each other as “malignant - like tumours”. The mutations “corruptions of form ... duplicates of form ... echoes” get more obvious as the scientist soldiers got closer to the centre of the anomaly.   It is integral to the movie - down at the bone-marrow level - for these characters to be women.  The Shimmer is vibrant with life and, of course, women are synonymous with the creation of life, so it is only right that they should explore such a verdant place.

            The evidence of life changing - one could even say evolving - that they find inside The Shimmer is both beautiful, in a painterly way, and grotesque.  There are traumatising images in thee which will live with you long after you’ve finished watching.  We get moments of truly disturbing body horror, and the evidence of spectacularly horrific events in the past - rather like MacReady and his team stumbling on the frozen remains in the Norwegian base, in The Thing (1982) - another unisex film about isolation and duplication, which this movie quietly channels and challenges.

Natalie Portman, submitting her audition tape, should they ever want to recast Ellen Ripley.

             Garland resists the temptation to bombard us with what John Carpenter calls cattle-prods (loud bangs to make the audience jump).  The film’s big set-piece is the attack of a skull-faced bear, which is all the more shocking because there is no musical build-up to warn you it’s coming ... Just the Stalker-like eerie tone in the air immediately after.  Then there are the human voices in the music - umming and droning in a style not dissimilar to the aliens in the Stargate sequence of 2001 (1968).  It all fills the film with unfamiliar life.

            This sequence is unbearably tense (if you’ll pardon the pun) with one woman armed and mad - although completely self-aware of her madness - one monster on the loose, and three people gagged and tied to chairs.  Very effective film making!

            We see everything with Lena - if she doesn’t see it, we don’t see it - we wake up when she does, and wonder just how long she has slept, like she does.  This is subjective film making, from the point of view of a woman who can no longer trust her own senses.

            However, if we are to believe what we see - then we see that light in The Shimmer diffracts.  It bends and splits - like light travelling through a prism, or through water in a glass.  The light of The Shimmer doesn’t blend into the world - it diffracts - it sits in the air like oil in water.  Imposed upon it, not part of it.

The alien's attempts to blend in seamlessly with human life produced some mixed results.

            The alien growths are not integrated into life, they sit upon  it, or grow through it and destroy it.  The humanoid plants have human genes.  Animal and plant has diffracted but, are they plants with aspirations to be human, or humans who would prefer to be plants?  Josie, the self-harming Physicist, clearly welcomes the change.  She goes native.

            After this, Lena, who is now alone, despairs and runs into the woods and - suddenly - finds herself on the beach, by the lighthouse she has been seeking.  Are we to believe this is literally happening, or another hallucination?  The film doesn’t tell us, it leaves us room to speculate.

Flower to the people.

            Now, in its dénouement, we are introduced to the third state of being: mineral.  The sand of the beach is growing into crystal trees, suggesting the minerals have memories of, or ambitions to become, plants.  Then Lena finds her actual husband - his body has transformed from organic to mineral.  A cinder shaped like a man, that maybe retained memories of once being a man.

            Inside the alien’s chamber (which looks way too much like an extruded egg-chamber from Aliens - one visual reference too many, methinks), Lena finally meets the alien - and it is truly alien.  It is a cloud - glowing like a black hole in reverse.  It communicates through music - deep, disturbing industrial synthetic sounds - after a soundtrack which has, hitherto, been entirely acoustic and human.  The alien creates an avatar of Lena, which doesn’t move independently of her, it mirrors her.  Mimicking her, but not perfectly.  It imitates her physically, where the skull-faced bear imitated its victim audibly.  This suggests that the alien influence isn’t really fundamentally changing life, just mimicking it.  Echoing it.

            When it touches her, the mimicry becomes complete.  It stops diffracting her and starts to reflect her.  It doesn’t understand fire - burning is just another state change to the alien, as with Lena’s husband, who changed from organic to charcoal.  So, burning the alien, isn’t really going to kill it, since it seems to exist at a sub-molecular level - like Carpenter’s Thing, it will just mutate and evolve and move on to a new medium.  It’ll never go away, it’ll just go on.

            This is a sufficiently chilling thought, that the film earns its cheesy horror-movie ‘surprise’ ending.

            Garland has humanised the characters as best he can.  In the novel (as in Stalker) the characters have no names, only job descriptions.  Here, he has named them - even though it’s easier, in a film, to do away with names.  Portman’s Lena is the emotional heart of the film - but she isn’t the hysterical girl tripping over tree roots, nor is she the hysterical romantic desperate to rescue her man; she’s a capable scientist and ex-soldier - they all are.  This film is very positive in its depiction of women as protagonists and as active agents.

            The rest of the cast carry a significant burden - having to impart a lot of exposition, whilst creating a distinctive and engaging character.  Swedish actress Tuva Novotny is particularly effective as Sheppard, who is the first trooper to befriend Lena.  I had a problem with Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Ventress, though.  Twenty-five years ago, Leigh was, in my estimation, the best actress working in Hollywood - in films like Rush (1991), The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) and Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994) there was no-one who could touch her for intelligent, intense performances.  She’s still interesting and very watchable - but, here, she just sounds interminably bored.   I presume that was an acting choice.  It’s almost like she’s been cloned before the film begins!

            Never-the-less, Annihilation is the smartest and most involving film I’ve seen in some time.  It is visually sumptuous and subtle.  It treats the audience with intelligence, and rewards the application of that intelligence.  It benefitted from a second viewing and I await, with anticipation, the disc release with, hopefully, a pile of extras from Alex Garland discussing his take on the film.

            Then I can watch it back-to-back with The Ritual.

Writer/Director: Alex Garland

Cert: 15
Dur: 115 mins

CELLULORD SHORTS: THE MUMMY

Gonna try something new.  Well, new to me.  It's called Getting To The Point.  Let's see if I write reviews that don't take ninety minutes to read.

Let's start with the latest rehash of The Mummy, out now on Bluray and DVD.  

So, basically, the pitch for this was something like: We'll take the Indiana Jonesy feel of the Brendan Fraser Mummy films and add back the good-natured horror of the original Universal horrors. 

Not the worst idea ever. Add in the still-likeable-despite-all-that-Scientology-twaddlle Tom Cruise and you've got a bankable movie idea.  After all, with 2013's Oblivion and 2014's Live, Die, Repeat (!) behind him, he's got form in off-the-wall SF, why not give off-the-wall horror a whirl? 

Yes, this film is supposed to launch the Dark Universe universe ... Cos every studio has to have its own universe now, thanks to the success of Marvel.  Maybe that’s why the story becomes so convoluted.  That, and the fact that no fewer than six people are credited with writing it (which means that far more were likely involved).

Basically, Cruise plays a mercenary type out in Iraq, who calls in an airstrike and unearths the tomb of Ahmanet.  She (for, surprisingly, this mummy is a she) isn’t as dead as several millennia underground would suggest, and curses Cruise.  He dies, but that doesn’t stop him causing all kinds of trouble for her.  He is recruited by The Prodigium, a group of ghost busters overseen by Dr. Jekyll (yes, that one) - here played by Russell Crowe.

No, Tom, we don't know what the hell's going on, either.

No-matter how crazy things get, Cruise is never less than 100% committed and deadly serious; while Crowe is clearly having a ball taking the mick out of himself and the whole silly affair.

Despite being American through-and-through, this film has a very English feel, and reminds me more of Hammer horrors than the Universal films it's following on from.  There's also a splash of American Werewolf (1981) and a dash of Lifeforce (1985).  Yeah, I know.

Tommy gets to do some running too (I think he has that written into his contracts), Russell Crowe gets to flounce around as a camp Henry Jekyll and then chew the furniture as evil Eddie Hyde,  and London fills up with the medieval dead.  Also, to her credit, Sofia Boutella makes much more of her role as Ahmanet than Cara Delevingne or Oscar Isaac got to do with their versions of, essentially, the same villain in last year’s Suicide Squad and X-Men Apocalypse.

There are creepy moments, chucklesome  moments, great stunty moments and, to keep the gamers happy, running zombie moments.

It's big and it's daft and I have not the first clue what they thought they were doing.  But it's fun watching them find out.  The Mummy is a proper old-fashioned popcorn movie.  Put your brain in neutral and enjoy the ride.

THE RITUAL

            Adam Nevill is a horror writer; he’s British, he didn’t die decades ago, his books aren’t about posh people in the past, and he isn’t Stephen King ... So the chances of one of his books being made into a film are, let’s be frank, virtually zero.  Yet still it has happened.

            Given how vanishingly rare British films are (that’s films which are financed in Britain - not like your Harry Potters and James Bonds which are American films that are made here), it’s a tragedy when a Brit film actually gets a nationwide cinema release, then turns out to be ... disappointing.  I mean, nobody really minds when a Hollywood movie is a flop, cos there’ll be another one along next week ... But British films are far rarer and more precious.

            I really didn’t want to have to report back that The Ritual was a letdown.  I really didn’t.

            Thankfully, I don’t have to - ’cos it’s excellent.  

It's to the script's credit that, when someone says "What the fuck is that?", the audience might be thinking "a wicker man" but no-one in the film actually says it!

            There is a sub-genre within horror fiction which is very on trend at the moment - called ‘Weird’.  It’s not a new sub-genre, far from it; it includes works by M.R. James, Arthur Machen and, most conspicuously, H.P. Lovecraft.  ‘Weird’ fiction tends to be supernatural, featuring an often-unseen thing that preys on the protagonists’ fears.  What sets these stories apart, for me, is the inference that the ‘unseen thing’ in the dark is often unfathomably ancient, leading some people to see it as god, while others see it as the devil.  One of the flat-out weirdest of the weird stories I’ve read, was written over a hundred years ago by one Algernon Blackwood.  It’s called The Willows, and concerns a canoeing expedition, where two friends are terrorised in the wilderness by evil spirits that live in the willow trees.

            You can listen to a free talking book version of it here, if you’re interested:

            Nevill has mentioned that he was influenced by that story.  And by a hiking expedition he and a few friends actually went on.  I trust they all made it back, safe.  I think he was also inspired, at least in part, by those cabin-in-the-woods movies, where a group of American teenagers are picked-off one by one by an axe-wielding maniac who, rather perversely, we’re supposed to root for.  Tonally, I'd say the book (and the resultant film), also owe something to survival-in-the-wilderness movies like Deliverance (1972) and Southern Comfort (1981) as well, of course, to The Blair Witch Project (1999), rather than to something like Friday the 13^th (1980); because the thing doing the slashing here, is a mysterious amorphous presence, hidden in the dense forest.

            You can’t see the weird for the trees.

            Inevitably, the film makers have made some key changes, when adapting the written word into the film.  The book begins with a shock - what, in TV circles, they call a ‘cold open’, the thing that is going to grab the viewer’s attention and stop them wandering during the adverts.  It’s a technique that has spilled over into film and, to an extent, into publishing - as a way of ensuring readers will buy the book so they can keep reading.

            Surprisingly, the film goes a different way.  It has created a whole new cold open - with the scene featured prominently in the trailer - where Rafe Spall’s Luke hides while his friend, Rob, is murdered in a convenience store.  This moment of cowardice adds a whole new emotional layer to the character, and serves as a wedge that gradually drives apart the group of surviving friends who, six months later, all hike into the wilderness in memoriam of Rob, whose last wish it was.  

Spall makes a good job of being the sympathetic everyman.  He's not a hero, he's not a villain, he's just conflicted and confused, like the rest of us. If he keeps this up, we might have to forgive him for being in Prometheus!

            None of this is in the book, but it does serve to create, very swiftly, an understanding of the dynamic between the friends, and explain why four woefully underprepared city boys are trudging through the Swedish woodlands.

            Often, when changes are made in the adaptation process, this can alter the tone or the nature of a book; but not here.  The feel of oppressive, mounting dread and sudden explosive violence, is maintained faithfully from page to screen.

            Director Bruckner worked on both The Signal (2007) and Southbound (2015) - two portmanteau films where different short stories are loosely connected to create one long story.  Both films were very imaginative, very effective and very unusual.  But they weren’t terribly subtle.  Here, he has allowed himself to be very subtle, giving much of the film’s first half hour over to simple character-building.  He has, essentially, stepped back to just watch his actors act.

            All four of his leads - Phil (played by TV regular, Arsher Ali), Dom (played by Sam Troughton, the latest generation of the Troughton dynasty), Luke (Rafe Spall, ditto the Spall dynasty) and Hutch (Robert James-Collier) - give great, humorous, believable performances.  They aren’t stereotypes (as one might expect from a cabin-in-the-woods film) and they all get their moment to shine during the surprisingly long first act, where they just get to bicker and whinge and make jokes at each other’s expense, as they wander further and further from the path.

            Although he’s been a busy boy, this is the first time I’ve seen Robert James-Collier on screen.  Apparently he was in Downton Abbey and, therefore, he can pretty-much name his price over in the States.  Yet he chose to make this.  An ensemble piece.  With, admittedly, a small ensemble.  Presumably because it allowed him to show some range.  I can certainly see him doing a nice line of English badguys in big budget American movies.

            His flat no-nonsense Manc delivery makes him the natural leader of the group, the clear alpha male; then, when the weirdness suddenly strikes at the end of that first act, the alpha male goes and pees his pants with fright.  That’s the moment when the observant viewer will realise that all the bets are off, this isn’t your standard issue stalk-and-slash and things are not going to proceed in the expected manner.

If you go down in the woods today ... left to right, we have: Robert James-Collier, Rafe Spall, Arsher Ali and Sam Troughton ... all camping it up.

           The cinematography makes the best use of the forests, stressing the uniformity of the verticals, the claustrophobia, the gloom and the lack of anything familiar, even sky.  The chills inherent in the scenario are there to be exploited.  They’re lost, they’re frightened and they can hear something crashing through the undergrowth, tracking them.  At times like that, the thin layer of nylon from which your tent is made, can feel pretty bloody thin.

            There are jump scares in here, to be sure, but they aren't cheap and obvious (there are no black cats jumping out of wardrobes, so fear not).  The jumps (cattle-prods as John Carpenter calls them) are earned, and they are used sparingly.  Instead, this film is mostly about building a mood of mounting dread, through silences and the impenetrable darkness around torch light.  They make good use of those torches, to create both tension, and some starkly beautiful visuals.

            One major alteration from the book, which I don’t necessarily think is an improvement, comes when the hikers encounter the locals.  Here, these are a tribal commune, like something out of the middle ages or, more tellingly, like something out of The Hills Have Eyes or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  In the book, the commune was very different, and something I have never seen in a film.  Still haven’t!

            So, at the very least, the book will retain some creepy surprises for you, if you read it after seeing the film.  Which you should.

If you can hear a ghostly banjo and someone saying "You ain't from these parts, are ya, stranger?" ... Don't worry, that just proves that you're still sane.

             Yes, you do eventually get to see the ‘unseen thing’ that’s been hunting them, and the FX which bring it together are particularly effective.  There are a couple of images, towards the end, which will live with you.  They’re certainly living with me.  And I am delighted to report that they have designed a completely new monster which owes nothing whatsoever to H.R. Giger.  Giger’s Alien has cast a long shadow over movie monsters for nearly forty years but, thankfully, this beastie is very different ... very disturbing ... very weird!

Dir: David Bruckner

Script: Joe Barton

Dur: 94 mins

Cert: 15

'IT' FLOATS

            It all began in 2011, when something that had lain dormant for 21 years was reawakened and stumbled blearily back into the light.  That monstrous entity was ... ‘The 1980s’.  Be afraid, kids; be very afraid.  This nostalgia, at least in movies, was resurrected by J.J. Abrams’ film Super 8.  That was a love-letter to Steven Spielberg’s films of the early 80s, those that he made himself, like E.T. and Poltergeist (both 1982) and those he produced, like The Goonies, and Back to the Future (both 1985).  These films had an inner sweetness at their core, a belief in family values, a suburban American setting, and (usually) a gang of kids getting into scrapes whilst being ignored by adults.

The gang's all here ... There's Fred and Daphne and ... no, wait, my bad: There's Xander and Willow and ... ehm ...

            The TV show Stranger Things did the same thing in the summer of 2016, and threw just as much of the other Steve into the mix.  So, this featured obvious influences from Spielberg’s films of the period, as well as Stephen King’s books (most obviously 1980’s The Mist and 1986’s It); not to mention a healthy dose of H.P. Lovecraft.  The show proved to be a phenomenon.  Audiences are clearly ready for this nostalgia, especially audiences who weren’t actually there in the 80s.  I’ve discussed Stranger Things with a lot of people and the ones who are really enthusiastic about it, are the ones who weren’t born then.

            I feel that this is important because this isn’t nostalgia for the actual 80s nor, even, for the films and books themselves but, rather, for the simplified image of the world they project.  Spielberg, like his buddy George Lucas, was inspired by his own nostalgia for his childhood, back in the 50s.  So, nostalgia for the films of the 80s is, by extension, nostalgia for the world of the 50s.  A time when people knew their place, when the war had been won, the new enemy was a long way away and, so far as kids were concerned, the world could be encircled with a white picket fence.        

            Given the chaos we see in the world every day, pining for simpler, more ignorant times is perfectly understandable.  Of course, in a Stephen King book, those white picket fences don’t keep the monster out, because the monster is, like as not, already in.

Steve and Steve, the two men whose imaginations have come to define a particular view of the 80s.  One seen through rose-tinted specs, the other through beer goggles.   Not surprising, then, that they haven't worked together. But never say never ... stranger things have happened.

            Although I have read most of King’s books of the 70s and 80s, I haven’t read It.  I know, I know, it’s a phenomenon, it’s his masterpiece; people have been telling me that for thirty years; but it never excited me.  Can’t explain why, unless it was just the sheer intimidating size of the damn thing.  I am a notoriously slow reader and a 1,200 page book would likely take me three months.

            And I’ve never seen the 1990 mini-series.  Or, if I have, it made so little impression that I’ve already forgotten it.  I know, I know, it has Tim Curry chewing up the furniture, ’cos his photo has been everywhere on the internet for months.  I remember, too, that it had John-Boy Walton in it.  Beyond that, nothing.

            So, I could approach the film cold, with no pre-conceived notions.  Unfortunately, what I couldn’t do, was wipe from my memory all the other horror films I’ve ever seen.  Even though I hadn’t read the source material or seen the previous adaptation, It suffers from over-familiarity. 

            They have followed the template of the Nightmare on Elm Street films, those immensely successful horror comedies of the 1980s, which are referenced deliberately and obviously here.  The problem with this, though, is that the Freddie Krueger films weren’t scary.  They were wacky and funny and sometimes a bit gross, but never actually scary. 

            It isn’t scary, either.

Creepy?  Yes.  Intriguing?  Certainly.  Actually scary?  No, not even close.

            This really is a horror film for beginners.  The twenty-or-so-year cycle of media fashion has turned and it’s time, once again, to roll out all those tried and trusted horror tropes that some of us remember from Halloween (1978), and the next generation got from Scream (1996).  The Milennials this film is targeted at have likely never seen this sort of Scooby-Doo caper before and, judging from the film’s astounding box office, they love it.  But I have been watching films since, it feels like, the beginning of time and, for me, a parade of empty jump-scares doesn’t work.

            It isn’t scary.

            The film has no sense of dread; nothing that was unknown or unexpected, which undermines the few potentially unnerving scenes in here, and waters down the few disturbing images.  The script relies far too heavily on the gang members going off on their own and, when they’re alone, doing something stupid like following a creepy figure into a dark room.

            The gang of kids feel so familiar that they are virtually stereotypes.  There’s the token fat kids, the token black kid, the ill kid, the funny kid and the token girl kid.  There’s a few others too but, frankly, that’s just too many kids to keep in one’s mind.  Then, when they find themselves in a dangerous position, there is a lot of screaming.  Really painful high-pitched childish screaming that seemingly never ends.

And then there was this creepy clown and he, like, possessed the slide projector and ... Zoiks!

            There’s nothing conspicuously wrong with the film, all of the set-pieces are well handled, the special effects work, the performances are generally good (a couple of the kids are trying too hard, but the others are spot on) and the new improved Pennywise the Clown is an excellent creation.  His squeaky, childish voice is properly unnerving in the opening storm-drain scene. 

            But it isn’t scary.

            And I can feel the scaffolding of the book propping up parts of the script.  Pennywise hints at his motivation but doesn’t really get any significant dialogue with which he can explain himself, until the end so, for the first two-thirds of the film, you don’t really know what he’s up to nor why.   Which makes it difficult to care.
              Structurally, the film is a mess, with too much time being spent on unconnected haunting scenes (each kid has to have his/her own hallucination, his/her own haunting) then, when they decide on some action and attack the monster where it lives; they take some casualties, so promptly give up.  They go away and the gang breaks up; simply so the film can get them all back together again five minutes later, then they go back into the creature’s lair and finish the job.  Over several hundred pages of sprawling, epic novel, this probably works; but in a lean, linear movie, it really doesn’t.

They really needed to sit down and squeeze the source novel - to flush away some of the extraneous characters and subplots.

            We get hints at some of the characters’ back stories - particularly in relation to their parents - but these whip past too fast to make much impression.  I’m sure that King will have filled all this in, in far more detail in the book.  But, for the film script, I’m thinking they should have either given these elements enough screen-time for them to develop some relevance, or cut them out completely.  It wouldn’t have hurt to cut the size of the gang down, either.  The novel will have had time to make a football team of characters distinct and interesting (that is one of king’s great strengths) but movies are best when they are precise and concise.  If there had been fewer children, but they had been better developed, I feel I would have cared more about them.

            One ingredient I recognise from other King books, is the depiction of the parents.  Their only function in this film is to fuck up their kids.  That’s it.  One way or another, all of the parents are weak or venal or violent and, yet, the kids are (with the exception of the one-dimensional school bully) reasonably well-balanced healthy kids.  For most of the film, however, the parents are an absence.  Platoons of kids are being taken from the town by Pennywise, and yet we are barely told about it, nor do we see any of the pain this is causing, except to our little gang.  It's there, in the background, fleetingly.  But, again, this either needed more screentime, or no screentime at all.

            It’s long been understood (well, it has by me) that short stories and novellas work best as film adaptations, because they tend to be narrower in focus with more economical stories and more manageable cast-lists.  For a Stephen King book the size of a telephone directory (and with a similar number of characters) this adaptation really could have done with being an ongoing TV series rather than a couple of two-hour movies (oh, yes, things aren’t done yet ... this is just Chapter One).

            Still, the film has been a sudden and resounding success, so expect it to be followed by a plethora of films featuring supernatural adversaries which have their devilish schemes foiled by gangs of meddling kids.  Scooby-dooby-doo!

Dir:  Andy Muschetti

Writers: Chase Palmer, Cary Fukanaga, Gary Dauberman

Dur: 135 mins

Cert: 15