Locked (2025)

Score: 1.5 / 5

The fourth cinematic version of this story, Locked manages to be a kinetic and zippy ride that kept me guessing as to the direction it was headed. It was also repetitive to a fault and quite boring for me. This crime thriller may be some folks' cuppa, but it was not mine.

Bill Skarsgard brings his formidable skills to the fore as Eddie, a petty criminal who just wants to be free of his sins and live a safe and secure, if not comfortable, life with his young daughter Sarah. Here, he's an anxious, panicky weasel of a man whose desperation lands him in a "Dolus" (I don't speak car; is this a real thing? I don't care), a luxury SUV pimped the fuck out with all the bells and whistles you can (and can't) imagine. It's sitting conspicuously in the middle of an urban lot, unlocked, and so he naturally gets in to see what he might nab. When the car locks him in, he can't escape, attempting suddenly urgent violence and cutting his arm in the process, but to no avail. Then the digital screen begins to ring.

There's a long tradition of single-location movies with a cast of one or two actors, the best of which hinge on claustrophobia and psychological distress. Yet director David Yarovesky and his cinematographer and editors don't do much to highlight those aspects, despite almost the entire screenplay taking place in close, limited perspective on Eddie. We're taken in highly energized visual flights around the vehicle, especially in moments when it gets piloted remotely, and we soar high above, before, and behind it as it careens through city sprawl and mountainous curves alike. It's a small frustration, perhaps, but seems ill-chosen in a film meant to force us into a certain headspace.

Speaking of our remote pilot, Anthony Hopkins plays the film's antagonist, William, whose car Eddie has woefully entered. His trap is highly moralistic, sparked by a twofer personal tragedy that apparently caused sociopathic madness, and he preaches about it at length. Mostly invisible during the film, Hopkins uses his iconic voice to devastating effect, more lucid and vicious than we've seen (or, rather, heard) from him in quite a while. I should have been overjoyed by the time he graces our eyeballs by the film's climax, but by then I was so annoyed by what the screenplay created him to be that I just wanted the movie to end. Unfortunately, the climax is far too lengthy and redundant for any such simple finale.

Probably my most significant gripe with the film is its insistence on thematic -- read, moral -- ambiguity. Eddie doesn't even break into the car initially; I'd have liked a film that made him a real bad guy and then asked us to endure and consider his suffering. And suffer he does: William's bells and whistles include several torture devices and practices, which he unleashes with chilling glee. But, for all the screenplay's pontificating about ethics and legality and morality, and for all William's cleverness and vigilantism, he's very clearly labeled insane and sadistic, not unlike the lesson-teaching evils in Saw movies. So we have a bona fide monster -- personal tragedy notwithstanding -- literally torturing a highly sympathetic opportunist for 90 minutes. There's almost nothing of interest, to me, in that premise. Or in its execution here.

Perhaps most egregiously, to that point, is an extended sequence of pure horror as William directs the vehicle to slaughter other criminals on the street and then to terrorize and nearly kill Eddie's young daughter. It's this kind of tasteless trash that really boils my blood, especially as, while these scenes are occurring, William continues his endless monologue. The takeaway from the film, ultimately, is that wealthy people -- the literally crazy rich -- are a blight on society. That the "haves" can and do torture the "have-nots" and that that's unjust. No shit, Sherlock! And, for all its ado, it fails to elicit audience investment because it's never so dour that we don't think for a single minute that the quietly righteous Eddie will die. Of course he -- and we, by extension -- will escape this trap and live peacefully and more thankfully with our loved ones and eschew further crime. So the nonstop torture was really just for...fun? I think not.

Nosferatu (2024)

Score: 5 / 5

Eggers is back, baby, and his latest feature only cements his place as a leading voice in horror as well as period filmmaking. Working best in making the familiar uncanny, he turns here to new territory: adapting pre-existing material with a long history of other adaptations. But, even in telling an old story everyone knows, he makes each moment feel pulsing, throbbing, and thick with menace. Eggers eschews easy access, as is his wont, turning the simplistic story of an existentially dangerous outsider threatening civilization and life itself into a Gothic puzzle box of creeping dread, erotic taboo, and wintry frisson. A masterclass in designing and maintaining atmosphere, the latest iteration of Nosferatu is also one of the most important and satisfying films of the year.

Given his track record of uncompromisingly accurate period pieces -- be they in colonial America or ancient Iceland -- Eggers here takes us to Wisborg, Germany, just before Christmas 1838. There are no real analogies baked into the film itself, though its powerful story certainly begs for contemporary application of its themes; Eggers prefers to establish his world as urgently and consequentially real on its own terms. It would seem that the more effectively he does so, the more alarmingly relevant his themes become in our own world. Consider the state of male homosocial bonds and mental health in The Lighthouse or the rising power of women and harmful dogma in The Witch. With Nosferatu, as we might expect, themes of foreign plague and the difficulty of free will coalesce into a heady cocktail with erotic overtones.

This is not necessarily Eggers's own doing. F.W. Murnau's iconic 1922 original film has always held a curious place in pop culture: a bastardized adaptation of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula, the film was destroyed en masse after the Stoker estate successfully sued it for unauthorized piracy, even with character names and setting altered from London to Germany. Some recordings survived, and it has since become known as not only the first vampire film but, in many ways, the first real horror film. That it was made by and subsequently immortalized one of the first openly gay directors in film is a fun tidbit. The film is still so popular, in fact, that its influence extends far beyond cinephiles' ecstasy.

Though Dracula of course combined the many eastern European legends of vampiric creatures of the night to make a single, iconic horror monster with too many thematic elements to list, Nosferatu added a few of its own. Whereas Dracula can pass through nineteenth-century society reasonably well, Orlok (the corresponding vampiric count of Murnau's imagining) looks like a long-dead corpse or even what 1960s American film might loosely see as gray aliens from space, with his bulbous, balding head, exaggerated features, and particularly inspired long fingers and nails. His appearance has long cultivated some speculation that he is designed to demonize Jewish physiological stereotypes, which adds an interesting if unfounded dynamic to his Otherness at the time. Too, whereas Dracula is weakened by sunlight but can still function during the day, Orlok is finally defeated by the sun's rays, which instantly destroy his body. That entered the vampire zeitgeist in a single puff of editing from Murnau's film and has never left.

By 1979 (the same year of the television short film "The Halloween that Almost Wasn't," for those of you wonderful freaks who know the gems of our genre), another version of Nosferatu was necessary to make vampires interesting again -- after so many Dracula-related movies from Universal in the '30s and '40s and Hammer in the '50s, '60s, and '70s that vampires were ubiquitous and familiar, essentially children's play, in American media -- so Werner Herzog crafted Nosferatu the Vampyre as an amalgamation of Murnau's film with character names from Stoker's novel to try and combine the disparate elements of our cultural foundation for vampire fiction into one moment that got back to its own roots. As the titular character, Klaus Kinski's performance and character design brought the iconic look immortalized by Max Schreck in 1922 into the sensibilities of a whole new generation. Herzog updated the end to show the lasting effects of vampiric horror on men of the world and how that threat never really dies, and he specifically imbued his tragic heroine (this time played by a radiant Isabelle Adjani) with erotic and spiritual agency. Then, in 2000, a relatively unknown director and writer pairing created Shadow of the Vampire, an independent horror-comedy (though, really, it confounds such simple categorization) about the making of the original Nosferatu with an ingenious and horrifying twist, starring John Malkovich as Murnau and Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck among a shockingly star-studded cast.

With all this grandiose tradition behind it, and the accompanying expectations, Eggers could easily have bitten off more than he could chew. Nosferatu was reportedly one of his earliest passion projects as a filmmaker, but he deliberately held off on it until his credentials established himself as worthy of tackling it. The time clearly has come, as his loving care and detailed attention is rapturously realized here, infectious through each image. In our screening, I gasped in awe at the pure nightmarish vision even in the earliest scenes, often when no action whatsoever is occurring onscreen. Just the first shot alone demonstrates this, opening in darkness until Ellen, the female protagonist, lurches forward, speaking to us and to a disembodied voice, inviting "us" to come to her before she walks through the void to a large open window, the fluttering curtains of which show a similarly disembodied shadow. Eggers hides other such long takes quietly in his film, not drawing attention to them but effectively dropping them when they have the greatest unnerving impact.

Unlike most films of this story (and I do include the Dracula story in this assessment), this one feels generally as if it is being told by the vampire directly, or at least with his aesthetic literally plaguing every frame. It's unusual, especially in a film that hinges on the vampire's eroticism, for the monster to be a desiccated, decaying corpse with open sores and voice from the grave. Played here by an unrecognizable Bill Skarsgard, Orlok's booming demoniac voice rumbles up like tectonic gravel underfoot, suggesting age and potency despite his carapace which can only be described as syphilitic and rotting. His large bristling mustache brings a spiderlike fascination to his oral cavity, and matches well with his garb, which seems to be inspired from a Cassock's furred cape (side note: someone called him an "evil nutcracker" online and that seems deliciously apt). His castle -- apparently filmed on location -- is the stuff of Gothic nightmares, and Eggers leans into it, sapping it of color and visible style, viewing it mostly with natural light and through opaque silhouettes of various door and window frames. This visual entrapment is maintained throughout the film, continuing as the action moves to the German city where Orlok will strike.

The vampire has always brought with its bloodthirst certain elements to threaten various facets of human existence, including religious heresy, foreign political and economic advancement, unnatural influence over nature (weather and animals), sexual aggression toward men (the females are usually taken for granted or as tools to get to the males, with Nosferatu being a notable exception), rendering science irrelevant or even useless, and of course social collapse due to plague. Whereas this was more invisible in Stoker's story (despite some "dirty animal" interactions, the infectious elements are bloodborne), Murnau's intervention was to literalize the plague, made visible by the arrival and permeation of rats in Wisborg. Eggers capitalizes on this, and the final act of the film features a few increasingly apocalyptic shots of city streets collapsing with corpses and overrun by rodents. 

Feeling inspired by the German expressionism iconized by the original film, Eggers crafts wholly original shots and pairs them with equally fresh sound design, acting choices, and dialogue that enhance our understanding of the familiar story. He leaches color from many scenes, making this film often appear black and white through minimal natural light; he also relies on blue color grading, only dispelled by pale fire light, and I'd be fascinated to hear from him some of his color theory. Whereas the original was of course silent, here Eggers's own screenplay talks a lot, and some may find it a bit overbearing. But (and despite the lack of German accents, for some weird reason; The Northman had plenty of effective Nordic accent work) I think this is for multiple reasons: first, to clear the air about the various elements that have come before and start fresh with as much detail packed in as possible for a new generation of moviegoers; second, to thematically establish the necessity of communication between characters faced with unknown threats; third, to add much-needed character depth and dynamics to what have long since become stock types. This is the first time in a Dracula story since Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula that I've cared deeply for any human characters, and that comes from Eggers letting us get to know them beyond their fated role in the plot.

Much will be made of the various performances, particularly of Skarsgard's presence, which many will decry as wasteful, though I'd urge another viewing for his voice work alone. He feels ancient, like a living curse dug out of a grave and filmed sacrilegiously, cursing us by extension. Lily Rose-Depp provides impressive physicality to Ellen, in turns gliding and writhing like a possessed child in exorcism horror; I personally strongly disliked her emotional and verbal performance, which felt forced and overacted along with being almost indecipherable aurally, but a single capable performance won't derail an entire film due to individual preference. Nicholas Hoult, returning to vampiredom after Renfield, plays a wonderfully earnest Thomas Hutter, Ellen's husband, who is Orlok's first conquest in this schema. Enthralled and mesmerized by the count, who eventually discards him due to an unexplained obsession with Ellen (frustratingly so, in this one, which feels more inspired by Coppola's romantic notions than by any other version of either Dracula or Nosferatu), Thomas eventually saves himself from his Transylvanian prison and, with the help of Romani peasants, returns to Wisborg to save them from Orlok's advance. To do so, a group of men convene including the Van Helsing character, Albin Eberhart Von Franz, played by a somewhat poker-faced Willem Dafoe, similarly returning to vampiredom in a welcome and shockingly, beautifully understated performance as a character almost always overcooked. I particularly liked the surprising inclusion of Emma Corrin and Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Ellen's best friend and her husband, as they add more emotional stakes and varying ideological viewpoints to the barebones story. Finally, Simon McBurney pops in for a few memorable scenes as Herr Knock and... well, if you know, you know.

Perhaps Eggers's greatest triumph -- in a singular movie littered with them -- is making vampires terrifying again. We haven't seen this kind of monster headlining its own story in many long years (no, I am not forgetting The Last Voyage of the Demeter), and this time he's not just drinking blood. Eggers helps him get under our skin, where the rot can fester. I haven't felt so cold in a movie since The Revenant, and even thinking about certain visuals has me shivering now. One scene in particular had me moaning in my seat, early in the film, as Hutter walks down a wooded road to the castle during a wintry night: the dark trees morph into a black tunnel around a bright, almost white, circle of snowfall above a path with Hutter's silhouette. Despite the silence, a pulsing pound slowly rises, perhaps a heartbeat, until a shadow of horses pulling a carriage emerges from the void, almost out of tune with the sound until it crashes into visibility. Robert Frost ain't got shit on this snowy evening in the woods.

John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023)

Score: 5 / 5

Delayed, no doubt, by the pandemic, John Wick has returned to us for my favorite film in the franchise. Four years after Parabellum, we jump back in shortly after the events of that film as our title character (Keanu Reeves) prepares, along with the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne), to get revenge on the High Table for their treachery and cruelty. After Wick kills the Elder, "the one who sits above the Table," the remaining members empower the Marquis de Gramont to use any means necessary to stop him. The Marquis, played by a delicious Bill Skarsgard, makes short work of getting started, destroying the Continental and executing Charon (the late Lance Reddick) and excommunicating Winston (Ian McShane). He then enlists a retired assassin (Donnie Yen), on threat of murdering his daughter, to find and kill Wick and end it all.

It's a lot very fast, and if you're not already on board with the series, you'll be overwhelmed quickly. Thankfully, this chapter was written more like the first than the previous two, trimming the world-building and mythology of this shadowy organization of ruthless killers and focusing much more on Wick himself and the cost this lifestyle has had on his body and mind. Sadly, many of the characters we've picked up along the way are absent here -- I missed Angelica Huston and Halle Berry, but with all the globe-spanning action, you can't include everybody -- but I liked the sharper dramatic focus and impossibly lengthy action sequences. Which is saying a lot for this film, as it is almost three hours long!

The final hour (or so, I completely lost track of time) of this film is one of the most electrifying action sequences I've ever seen. Period. Urgent and alarming, beautiful and brutal -- much like the series in general -- it makes a strong case for artistic and elegant violence. It's not wholly unlike some video games, which master action in ways few films do: there are clear stakes, the focus is on one (or at most two) characters, and there is little editing to distract from choreography and martial arts. But this is true of every action sequence in these films, not just this final hour (which takes place on a lengthy stone staircase below Sacré-Cœur; did I mention that this film mostly takes place in a gorgeously shot Paris?). There's one chase-and-fight scene around the Arc de Triomphe that had my eyes popping our of my skull, and another in a bizarrely trippy nightclub surrounded by dancers who generally seem uncaring about the violence. Apart from the skill with which these sequences were designed and executed, one wonders about the intention behind them, perhaps commenting on the ways regular passers-by don't seem to notice -- or care -- about bodies piling up within eyesight.

Most people come to these movies for Reeves, and he's at his best here, injecting his vengeful, violent protagonist with a weariness and emotional exhaustion that is pitch-perfect for (SPOILER ALERT) what may well be his final film in the franchise. Like Reeves or not, you have to admire his ability to know exactly what the film around him needs his character to do, and he fulfills it in every moment. I come to these movies more for Dan Laustsen's cinematography, which reaches impossibly brilliant heights this time around. I hope this isn't the end of the series, but if it is, it's a hell of a way to go out.

Barbarian (2022)

Score: 4 / 5

For Zach Cregger's feature directorial debut, Barbarian is an absolute doozy. The most unpredictable, genre-hopping horror film I can readily think of, it is written brilliantly: completely coherent even as it aggressively tries to surprise us at every turn. It starts with one of the most effective and relatable (but no less horrifying) premises I've seen in recent years, and from there it launches into a roller coaster ride of terror. It's one of those films that makes you feel icky while and after watching, but it's so damned smart that I really want to watch it again sometime soon to appreciate its focused efforts to subvert our expectations and refract our perceptions.

Tess (Georgina Campbell) arrives at her Airbnb in the dead of night. It's pouring outside, and she can't see anything of the neighborhood in this forgotten neighborhood of Detroit in the present day. She's a documentary researcher and needs to rest and relax a bit before her big interview in the city tomorrow. But there's a light on in the Airbnb and another car there, and there's no key in the lockbox. Finally roused from slumber -- or so he suggests -- the current inhabitant opens the door. His name is Keith (a suitably creepy Bill Skarsgård) and he doesn't seem to want any guests. Who would, right? You get an Airbnb, and you expect to be left alone, like in a hotel. But between the late hour and the intense rain, he pities her and invites her inside, but only after they prove to each other that they indeed made reservations and were mysteriously, annoyingly double-booked.

Skarsgård plays against type here, leaning into the innately creepy situation and his performance history to be unnerving even as he charms the heck out of Tess and us. He's a bit verbose, but clearly means well: he knows this is awful and that the optics are not in his favor. He offers to sleep on the sofa so Tess can have the bedroom (with a door). He wants to split the wine but waits for her to open it so she knows he hasn't tampered with it. He wishes her well at her interview and sets up what is probably meant to be a celebratory date. Cregger and his cinematographer use the subtlest shifts of light and angles to make their scenes uncanny; that is, familiar but wrong somehow. It's our job (and Tess's) to find out exactly what's wrong and why and how to escape. Right?

Well, maybe not. Some secrets need to be explored first, as evidenced when Tess awakes later in the night to her door wide open and Keith having an apparent nightmare. One thing leads to another, and eventually by day, when Keith is gone, Tess wanders into the basement and gets stuck. Looking for a way out, she discovers a semi-hidden rope that pulls open a secret door in the cement. Anyone would tell you not to go in there, but naturally she does and discovers horrible things. Well, the things themselves aren't inherently horrid, but her suspicions of what they mean altogether are monstrous. And those things are paired with her already discomfited stay, her opinions of the rundown neighborhood and that aggressive, scary neighbor who chased her down, and the warnings of the area given by the woman who interviewed her.

This first act of the film -- don't worry, I will try not to give any spoilers this time -- ends shortly after this, when Tess ventures further down into the basement. It's a screaming climax that comes a bit too soon for most horror films. But then the film does an about-face (not unlike the shock twist of Psycho) and actor Justin Long shows up as "AJ". He's a fascinating and loathsome character, as we discover in an absolutely brilliant marriage of screenwriting and acting, and his tale comprises the second act of the film. I feared it would include a redemption arc for him, but, without spoiling anything, the film is too smart for that. Finally, there's the third act of the film, which is the out-and-out horror fest that left me absolutely breathless with anxiety and dread. It's the most rote of the acts, but by this point I needed something a little familiar to grasp or I was going to panic.

It's not a perfect movie. Many discussions -- all of which should be necessary and would be fascinating -- will revolve around the film's characterization of women, of men (which I think is the primary mode of horror here), of poverty, of greed and vanity. There is the cringey depiction of an impoverished Detroit, much like that used in Don't Breathe (which shares a surprising amount of DNA with this film), that we could all do without, despite its relevance and relative authenticity. There is the unbearable but constant series of idiotic actions taken by most characters; by the third act, I almost wanted more terrible things to happen to them to punish them for being so endlessly stupid. Thankfully, there is no actual depiction of sexual violence in this film, even though it's a major series of plot points and character arcs, so that's good, although we definitely still feel the impact cognitively. 

And then there's the title itself, a stroke of pure genius that creates a sort of maze for us as viewers to venture through, looking for its significance and meaning. Is it Keith? AJ? Tess? Someone else (we learn of a few other people connected to this house, none of whom are very nice)? Could it be the house itself, situated as it is on Barbary Street? I think the answer is "yes"! I'd argue it also refers to the cycle of misogyny in generations and cultures of toxic and evil men and the effect they have on the rest of us, especially on women. That entitlement led those men to build the world, and now we're all trapped in it. Can we escape?

The Devil All the Time (2020)

 Score: 1.5 / 5

It's at least the devil for two hours, and that was more than enough for me. The new Netflix drama The Devil All the Time dropped this weekend, and I was ready for Spider-man to go full Southern Gothic. As I sipped pinot noir, I was treated to a haunting opening sequence of WWII in which American soldiers come across one of their own sergeants crucified on a battlefield by the Japanese. To end his suffering, Willard (Bill Skarsgard) shoots him in the head. After his return home in Ohio, he gets married and has a son named Arvin, whom he raises in their rural Christian faith. But, thanks in large part to Skarsgard's shell-shocked and glistening eyes, we know that Willard has seen actual horrors every time he beholds his religious crosses. It's this sort of timeless reminder of the bloody basis of Christianity I expected from the movie, and it's one that would have more than satisfied me.

But then the movie almost immediately falters, and never recovers. We are suddenly thrust into the lives of other, seemingly unconnected characters, and we quickly lose track of whatever timeline we should be following. The film rockets us across time and place, from Ohio to West Virginia, from 1945 to 1965 and several times between, and through crucial moments in the lives of no fewer than eight people. It doesn't help that many of them look and act the same. I was quite lost well before the halfway point of the movie, which seemed to consist of episodic scenes depicting depravity, violence, and cruelty. In fact, the violence is often so sudden and so graphic that I wondered if this was meant as a straight-up horror flick. But the melodrama greatly outweighs anything, which renders these scenes grotesque and the whole of the film little more than poverty porn.

The main plot follows Arvin (Tom Holland, unexpectedly flexing his acting chops) as he comes of age. He fiercely protects his step-sister Lenora (Eliza Scanlen) from any and all evil but of course is unable to stem the tide of evil in the world. He then embarks on a journey of revenge that costs many more lives than necessary, and in his bloody wake the hounds close in, notably the corrupt Sheriff (Sebastian Stan) seeking revenge for his sister (Riley Keough). His sister, mind, is a serial killer who was killed by Arvin along with her hubby Carl (Jason Clarke) after they attempted to abduct and kill Arvin. Oh, and I can't forget that Lenora's mother (Mia Wasikowska) was killed by her preacher father (Harry Melling) who handles spiders instead of snakes and starts hallucinating after one too many bites, thinking he can resurrect the dead.

Sound crazy? It is, and this is only the first half of the damn movie.

Indeed, I can conceive of little reason this movie exists at all, except to say that the American heartland -- at least its Appalachian foothills -- is populated by a cast of stupid, violent people whose religious fanaticism has long been its only social standard and who escape the sad realities of their lives through violence and vengeance. It is increasingly difficult to make narrative or thematic sense of any of it, partly due to the bizarre editing and unremarkable production design, partly due to the unfocused and broad scope of its screenplay. We're not allowed into any character's psyche because we are yanked between characters too often. Even the most delicious performance in the film -- I'd say the performances are wonderful across the board -- is lost in the messy void: Robert Pattinson, whose crisp, clean preacher with a campy, overbearing personality is as delightful as it is surprising, and I'm not sure it fits within its context. Which may be the point, but as nothing else here compares to it in tone or delivery, I find his relative lack of consequence troubling.

Ultimately, the movie feels like a vicious fever dream, an uninspired attempt at Gothicizing rural America by demonizing its religious foundations -- which arguably deserve this kind of treatment, and more -- and exploiting the impoverished and uneducated lower classes. For example, we derive a certain pleasure in seeing the insane preacher pouring live spiders on his face, sure, and even seeing him get his comeuppance, but the film's question of stopping the cycle of violence is made irrelevant by the cruelty and stupidity of its protagonist. There is little worth watching in this movie, from its incoherent plot incomprehensibly strung together by a laughably bad voiceover narrator (apparently the author of the book that inspired this movie) to its squandered cast of A-listers, and finally to its celebration of the banality of evil in the heartland. What a damned waste.

It Chapter Two (2019)

Score: 4 / 5

Sometimes it's best to stick with the basics. After a fabulous first outing, I was so excited for the finale. Rumors were flying about its length, its depth, its horror. And while the new film does indeed deliver on these fronts -- it's a hell of a lot of fun, surprisingly emotional, and spooky to boot -- it also suffers from unnecessary changes from the source material, awkward pacing, an undercooked screenplay, and a terrible title.

Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. We see the infamous, pulled-from-the-headlines opening scene of the novel in which Adrian Mellon, a gay man enjoying the Derry carnival (but apparently not enjoying Meg Ryan's hair), is brutally attacked by local bigots. The camera, thankfully, doesn't shy away from the assault, and we're reintroduced to Derry with a bang -- rather more of a crunch as the bullies punch and kick Adrian. It's a deeply disturbing scene, watching the asthmatic victim gasping for air before he is thrown into the river. Scenes like this -- in which the townspeople of Derry are demonstrably as evil as (perhaps more evil than) Pennywise -- are what make the book so memorable and horrifying. Unfortunately, these are also the hardest to capture on film, where the bogeyman is the moneymaker.

But, though this opening made me wonder how violent It Chapter Two would be, it's about as brutal as the movie gets. Sure, there's a vicious assault on the adult Beverly by her husband, there's Stan's sudden suicide, but the film really skims the surface of the real horrors lurking in Derry. Instead, the film tries to plant one foot in these physical dangers and the other in a pseudo-psychological world of perception, memory, and trauma. While arguably designed in the spirit of the novel (flashbacks and memories flood into adult consciousness in sudden and sometimes unexpected ways), the bizarre marriage of youth and maturity, of memory and reality, make the horror here less rooted in the body and more in the mind.

Thus we have what amounts to a madcap comedy, but in the horror genre. A parade of psychos and freaks and aggressively weird imagery floods the screen for nearly three hours, making the film an exercise in endurance for the audience. It's also an exercise in parsing the often oblique editing: we get many scenes with the kid-versions of the characters, but it's not always clear if it's a real memory, a perceived memory, or perhaps simply a hallucination brought on by panic, fear, and IT.

And, frankly, this film would have worked just fine relying solely on the adults. I understand the thematic importance of working through trauma, but we would have understood that because this is a sequel. We don't need to be constantly bashed over the head with new scenes of childhood terror at the hands of Pennywise -- that's what the whole first movie was about! (And I was especially irked that the new kiddo scenes are not based on the text anyway.) Rather, we could have had a totally adult movie that included more adult scares: Pennywise the second time around should be able to scare the adults as much as he had the children, but this movie makes it seem as though the adults are only scared because they remember him being terrifying.

A final complaint: the damn script is so romanticized (and torn between impulses and focus points) it's hard to really take the movie on its own terms because -- after only one viewing, admittedly -- I don't know what those terms are. The first chapter (God, I hate the "chapter" designation in the title, did I mention?) was a straightforward coming-of-age story that dealt with those horrors. Great. That makes sense. This time around, you'd think the Losers are either a) still coming of age, or b) aged and working with age-appropriate horrors. Instead we get c) a strange mix of the two, with almost none of the book's deep knowledge of adult issues rooted in childhood trauma. What do I mean? Let's go....

Henry Bowers becomes a random madman tossed into two or three scenes to add a scare, but we are given virtually no insight into his story, his character, or his own trauma. Pennywise himself is a very different character here, preying on emotional instability and desperation more than fear itself; at one point, he even describes himself as having "missed" the Losers in a strange masochistic monologue. Bill is a clear stand-in for Stephen King himself, who makes a sizable cameo, but his wife is notably absent from the proceedings; Beverly's husband similarly disappears after his early scene; these changes make the Losers appear still childlike, not in real adult relationships. Similarly, Richie takes on what is essentially Eddie's character in the book, that is, that he's gay and been closeted his whole life. While this would seem to act as a nice mirror to the opening hate crime, Richie of course does not get to fulfill his apparent lifelong crush on Eddie because (SPOILER ALERT) Eddie dies at the end. Then again, no version of this story was ever meant to have a happy ending.

*Speaking of queerness, I just have to add that this film is pretty queer. One lovely flashback hints a bit more at Richie's queerness. While I was bothered at first that they switched the closet case from Eddie to Richie, I think I like this better: they really made it work with Richie's caustic humor, and then it pairs nicely with Eddie's mama's-boy-ness. But perhaps the most unexpected and fabulous scene in the movie comes from Richie's confrontation with Pennywise on the Derry green space. With the hyper-masculine statue of Paul Bunyan on one side and the hyper-feminine cheerleaders practicing their routine on the other, Richie is caught in the middle, watching Pennywise floating toward him under an upside-down balloon pyramid singing about his "secret". Wow. It's an amazing high-camp moment of pure frisson, heightened by the hint that Derry passerby can also see the proceedings (they freeze and watch in the background).

Perhaps the two most egregious oversights I see in this romanticized script, however, concern Stan and Derry itself. First, of course, it's Stan's death that first horrifies the adult Losers. But by the film's denouement, we learn that Stan wrote letters to his friends letting them know he sacrificed himself partly due to fear but mostly to unite them into a common purpose in confronting Pennywise. What? That's on par with 13 Reasons Why levels of glorifying suicide. The whole point should be that Pennywise's horror was so traumatic that Stan couldn't bear the idea of returning. And then there's the town of Derry, so wicked and corrupt, which escapes totally unscathed by the end of this movie, lit in warm tones and a slight Hallmark-channel-esque haze in a final skyward shot. Again, what? In the novel, the town is mostly flooded in yet another cataclysmic event, as the psychic battle between the Losers and Pennywise basically explodes the sewer system and overloads the canal: the shit Derry doled out is returned in typical King fashion. I wanted some comeuppance, dammit!

Despite my irritations, this movie (I'm not using that title again) is thoroughly entertaining. A spectacular cast delivers on all fronts, and I found myself crying as much as gasping as they faced their fears. The movie is filled with lovely genre Easter eggs, most notably to The Shining and The Thing. Even the climactic battle, filled with some eye-popping and mind-bending visuals a la Mysterio in this summer's MCU flick, doesn't disappoint, and the Pennywise spider makes a vast improvement on its 1990 miniseries counterpart.

There is so much packed into this movie that I'll need to go again. And I'll hope, too, for a supercut of both parts with the much-teased deleted scenes added back in. (I heard they filmed the burning of the Black Spot and perhaps other Derry disasters, and I'm so ready for them all.)

It (2017)

Score: 5 / 5

The greatest joy of IT is that it's an absolute joy to watch. Stephen King screen adaptations tend to get a bad rap, by and large, because of how many there are and how bad many of them are. Poor production values and streamlined scripts have so often butchered the master of horror's work, though there are a few gems out there. I feared for this one. The sheer size and scope of the novel is daunting at best, and there has already been a fabulous adaptation in the 1990 miniseries starring Tim Curry in a now-iconic role. While that vision suffers, too, from some cheap effects and dated -isms, it has certainly stood the test of time as a classic iteration of horror-comedy. Sure, Tim Curry will freak you out a bit, but he's on screen so much and having such a blast, it's hard not to grin and bear the more horrific parts of the story -- namely, the wicked townspeople who harm and neglect their children.

Andy Muschietti's new film is everything we could have wanted and then some.

The year is 1988 (a logical update from the novel, which begins in '57; the film, catering to millennials and Gen Xers, seeks to evoke childhood nostalgia). The town is Derry, Maine, and children are going missing. The film follows a small group of concerned youngsters who call themselves the Losers Club as they unravel the mystery and confront the evil that plagues their town. We follow the seven Losers through the trials of their personal lives (abusive or absent parents, school bullies) as they come of age together. Indeed, the heart of the film lies with these breakout stars. Each kid owns the camera's attention like veteran actors, and each is so comfortable with the crude humor and abject terror that we believe each of them almost instantly. They navigate the hilarious waters of pre-adolescence with impeccable timing and laugh-out-loud delivery, which serve to make the horrors to come even more shocking. The writers and performers do some truly incredible work in those moments of friendship and camaraderie shared by the Losers. Their lighthearted banter and hypertalkative silliness are immediately endearing because it's so accurate. In fact, even without the titular villain, this movie would have been a good watch just for these kids. With such a large cast, it's hard to make the audience care for each kid equally and invest in their plights; this film perfectly highlights each one individually, and then as a group, so you never have to question, "Wait, which kid is that?" "What's his name?" "What's he going through?"

But this isn't just a sweet throwback to our youth, though the vibes of feel-good '80s dramedies are palpably present. There is true horror lurking under Derry, and Muschietti pulls no punches. In fact, apart from the excellent coming-of-age narratives, the greatest achievement of this film is in its horror. That may not mean much at first glance -- this is a horror film, of course it's good at that -- but look again. Horror is hard to film. Jump-scares are a dime a dozen, and though effective, don't usually sit with you long afterward. Movies that seek to genuinely disturb are often lost in psychosexual drama or gore-porn that confuses or irritates us. As I've said before, there are small but crucial differences between scary movies and horror films, and IT has the brilliant good sense to embody both.

Bill Skarsgard plays a damned terrifying Pennywise the Dancing Clown, to be sure. His rolling eyes, lilting inflection, and salivating lips are immediately chilling, but he has enough control to avoid any comparison to Tim Curry's aggressively psychotic iteration of the character. More importantly, the filmmakers here know that the best way to scare us is not to have Pennywise in full view or even physically present most of the time; rather, they keep him in shadows if he's present at all. Usually it's just a balloon or a subtle peek-around-the-corner that serves as knowledge of his presence, and it will drive you back in your seat. Effective, too, are his incarnations of the children's fears. Pennywise, you see, is a shapeshifter that takes on the form of children's fears to season their meat, so to speak. Gone are the embodiments of '50s pop horror, such as the Mummy, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the Wolf-Man. (That is, they are not present explicitly, though there are more than a few nods to the fanbase; during the climactic fight, Pennywise -- thanks to some eye-popping visual effects -- transforms from monster to monster faster than a boggart, and we do in fact see the werewolf's claw enlarging momentarily, and the icky moment of a mummy's bandages binding Ben's face to Pennywise's.)

Instead the filmmakers have delved deeper into the psychological trauma of the Losers and developed what really makes them squirm. Ben, having been researching the 27-year tragedies of Derry and stumbling upon the photo of a child's head in a tree following an Easter explosion, follows smoldering eggs to the library basement and is attacked by a child's headless specter. Mike, haunted by the memory of his parents burning to death in the Black Spot, sees burning hands reaching for him from behind a locked door. On the other hand, some of the children's fears are directly transferred from the novel. Beverly's onset of puberty and the incestuous abuse of her father set the stage for her bathroom horror show, the excessiveness of which recalls Carrie and the blood rain during the climax of the Evil Dead remake.

Apart from discussion of adaptations and details, though, I want to impress that my favorite element of this film is with its spirit. This is one of those adaptations that -- though remarkably faithful to source details -- captures the essence of King's novel so absolutely I find it astonishing he wasn't a producer or co-writer. IT has the distinction of being a horror film that feels like a waking nightmare. Partly because of its familiar design, and partly due to expert delivery, it starts as a dreamlike flashback and quickly darkens (after all, what good's horror if it doesn't come out of joy?). Sweeping camera motions and unnerving angles push us to view what we don't want to see by entrancing us, much as Pennywise entrances his prey. Muschietti even takes on Pennywise's inherent theatricality, distorting images and sounds as if they were in carnival funhouses, and regurgitating them on screen with gleeful malice. Even only two-thirds of the way through the movie (for fans, the encounter in the house on Neibolt Street) feels like a climax, simply due to its in-your-face violent terror. It was in that sequence I realized what Muschietti was doing: Scaring the shit out of us kids, gathered around a lit campfire, as he tells a story with every trick he's got. Heightened volume, incoherent children's screams, whirlwind cinematography and bewildering editing, and some spectacular special effects make this film a nightmarish descent into the hell of your imagination.

Don't cover your eyes. It might be worse than what you see on screen. That's how deep IT gets under your skin.

IMDb: It