Movie Review It Chapter 1

Stephen King's It (2017)

Directed by Andy Muschietti 

Written by Chase Parker, Cary Fukunaga, Gary Dauberman

Starring Jaeden Lieberher, Bill Skarsgard, Finn Wolfhard, Sophia Lillis 

Release Date September 8th, 2017

September 7th, 2017 

To say that the 2017 take on Stephen King’s Magnum Clown Opus IT is better than the 1990 mini-series is an understatement. The mini-series was a punishing nearly four-hour mix of a pretty good kids’ story and a nearly impossible to watch adult story. Jettisoning the adult story in favor of focusing on the far superior kids’ story from King’s novel, the 2017 IT crafts a tightly wound, creepy horror flick that plays on some serious issues about grief and abuse while delivering the kind of machine tooled jump scares that modern audiences go to the movies for.

IT stars Jordan Lieberher as Bill, the ringleader of a group of friends who are often picked on and lean on each other for support. Bill’s friends include Eddie (Jack Dylan Grazer), Richie (Finn Wolfhard), and Stanley (Wyatt Oleff). Along through, the story the core group adds Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor), a chubby kid who is new in town, Mikey (Chosen Jacobs), a home-schooled farm kid, and Beverly (Sophia Lillis), a young beauty who has an unwarranted reputation around the small town of Derry, Maine.

The story kicks off in 1988 when Bill’s little brother Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott) goes outside to play in the rain and goes missing at the hands of the evil clown Pennywise (Bill Skarsgard). In a scene that is actually quite shocking for modern horror film, Georgie’s disappearance sets a tone of fear and dread that director Andy Muschietti, a first-time feature director, does a tremendous job of maintaining over the course of the film’s two hour and fifteen-minute running time. The scene is legit frightening and Pennywise "The Dancing Clown” could not get a better or creepier introduction.

Naturally, the story from there is our group of young heroes battling Pennywise and trying to stay alive, but much like Stephen King’s book, director Muschietti and screenwriters Chase Palmer and Cary Fukunaga, who was going to direct the film before dropping out, do an exceptional job of introducing each of the kids’ obstacles and fears. While these scenes played like filler in the 1990 mini-series, because it’s TV and there are things you can’t do on TV, the movie is filled with genuine horrors and traumas these kids must overcome and that Pennywise uses to great advantage.

Find my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal. 

Horror in the 90s Misery

Misery (1993) 

Directed by Rob Reiner 

Written by William Goldman 

Starring James Caan, Kathy Bates 

Release Date November 30th, 1990 

Box Office $61.3 million 

The first images seen on screen in Misery are utterly meaningless. A Lucky Strike cigarette, unlit, an empty champagne glass, and a bottle of Champagne. Visually, you can read into this a celebration about to occur. Indeed, the subject of Misery, writer Paul Sheldon, played by James Caan, is about to finishing typing the final words of his final novel featuring the character Misery Chastain. Paul has decided to end his highly successful franchise and the opening visuals of the movie are an indication of the celebratory nature of this decision. 

But what do these images foreshadow for the remainder of the story? Nothing really. Paul Sheldon will soon be involved in a car wreck. He will be rescued by someone who just happens to be 'his biggest fan.' Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates), the fan, finds his novel and is none too pleased to find that her favorite book character is being killed off. Thus, she sets to set the author straight. She will hold him captive and torture him in order to get him to write a different, happier book, one more fitting her vision of Misery Chastain as her favorite book character. 

In the context of a novel, it's very clear that Stephen King is commenting upon the fickle nature of readers and their relationship to authors. King, whether he openly acknowledged it or not, was truly writing about having been pigeonholed and seemingly forced to write to the tastes of his readers rather than to what spoke to him as an author and artist. That subtext is underlined in the novel form. As a movie, it doesn't resonate quite as much. We can get a sense of the commentary occurring, but this is a movie, not a novel, moreover it's an adaptation of Stephen King and not King himself sub textually crying out at his audience to let him choose his subjects. 

Find my full length review at Horror.Media 

Movie Review: Cujo

Cujo (1983)

Directed by Lewis Teague 

Written by Don Carlos Dunaway, Barbara Turner

Starring Dee Wallace, Danny Pintauro, Ed Lauter

Release Date August 12th, 1983

Published June 19th, 2018 

In thinking of a classic monster movie to write about this weekend in correlation with Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom I wanted a non-traditional choice. Lots of critics and movie fans will be writing about classic monsters this weekend, it’s a good theme to coincide with a big budget monster movie. I was leaning towards Jaws but then I remembered The Meg is coming out this summer and that seemed like an apt moment to write about Jaws. So, I settled upon the unique choice of Cujo.

Now, you can argue that Cujo isn’t a monster movie. A dog getting rabies is a terribly sad story with many dramatic implications. But, as written about by Stephen King and directed by Lewis Teague, Cujo has much the same tension and arc as a great movie monster. In Fact, having seen Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom, I can tell you that Cujo is, for me, as frightening as Fallen Kingdom’s newest villain, the Indo-Raptor.

Cujo begins with a little boy frightened of monsters in his closet. Danny Pintauro, who would go on to child stardom on the 80’s series Who’s the Boss, plays Tad, a normal kid who will be terribly traumatized by the end of this story. Tad’s parents, Dee Wallace and Daniel Hugh Kelly, have hit a rough patch in their marriage. As we join the story, Dee is having an affair with a neighbor and Daniel is soon to find out about it.

In the meantime, Daniel needs his car fixed and turns to an amateur mechanic who lives just outside of their idyllic small town. Mr. Kember (Ed Lauter) is a jerk but he works on cars cheap. He has a dog named Cujo who we’ve already met. The opening of the film sets the tension early on as we watch Cujo get infected with rabies. Cujo chases a rabbit into a hole and while he is barking at the rabbit, he awakens bats also hiding in the hole and is bitten.

From there, the tension comes from when Cujo will turn into a frothing and feral monster that is ready to build a body count. Director Lewis Teague is very patient in how he deploys Cujo. We see the dog early in a scene where he’s introduced to Tad and his family and before he’s gone fully rabid. The scene is tense and Teague lays in the suspense with a shot of the bloody bite on Cujo’s nose. It’s 45 minutes, nearly half way through the movie before Cujo goes full Cujo.

Director Teague cleverly uses the dogs eye point of view to create tension in scenes. When Dee and Tad arrive at the Camber farm to get Dee’s car fixed, we know only Cujo is home at this point but Dee doesn’t. When the scene shifts to Cujo’s point of view from the barn he’s resting in, waiting for victims, the tension builds quickly and when Cujo bursts forth it’s nearly impossible not to gasp as Dee scrambles back into her shambling Pinto.

From there it is a series of tense scenes, a little bit of overacting from all involved, and some smartly played suspense over how Dee and Tad are going to survive this bizarre situation. I can’t speak to how much of the movie version of Cujo hues to what Stephen King wrote in his book but I can imagine that he mined the tension of this stand-off in a similar fashion. This is a classically Stephen King sort of set-up with average people in not so average peril.

Cujo isn’t an all time great film. Early on, the family drama is rather weak sauce. I understand the necessity of setting up the family dynamic and tension as it will be paid off at the end but the family stuff is clumsy and the film could have done a better job of tying this portion thematically to what Cujo is doing. The stuff about Daniel’s job as an ad executive is almost egregiously uninteresting.

That said, the tension surrounding Cujo the character is top notch, legitimately terrifying. I don’t know what an actual rabid dog is like but the rabid Cujo is a spectacularly gory horror show. Dripping with blood and other doggie bodily fluid and covered in dirt and guts, Cujo is dog body horror at its most horrific. Whoever dressed this dog did a magnificent job of making him legitimately terrifying.

I don’t want to think about what it may have taken to get Cujo to bark as he does but I hope that trickery and movie magic made him look so scary. The alternative is that the dog was made to do horrible things and that would make me hate this movie. For now anyway, I certainly don’t hate Cujo. The film is a remarkably good bit of B-Movie terror. The dog is scary, the way the dog is filmed is suspenseful and amps up the jump scares. It’s far from perfect, but for a drive in monster movie, Cujo is top-notch.