by Jason Adams
Slip into your yellow rain-slickers and come play with me down in the gutter, as the final trailer for director Andy Muschietti's It: Chapter Two arrived last week and we're taking a belated gander. While I preferred the shorter teaser that primarily focused in on a single creepy scene with Jessica Chastain, (taking over the role of Beverly from the terrific Sophia Lillis) and an old lady who's clearly not the old lady she seems to be, this full trailer delivers plenty of the pitch-black shocks we expect from these hard R-rated sojourns into what some consider Stephen King's most terrifying tale...
YES
-- Chapter Two takes us 27 years into the future from the first movie, and all of the casting for the aged-up Losers Club has been to my eye terrifically on point -- sure some of you might've preferred to see Lillis' Sharp Objects doppleganger Amy Adams in the role but Chastain seemed preordained given her previous working relationship with Muschietti, and Jessica Chastain is more than fine! Besides her though those cross-fades in the trailer get the point across...
... that James McAvoy, Bill Hader, James Ransone, Jay Ryan, Isiah Mustafa, and Andy Bean are looking like ace choices.
-- Once upon a time if you'd have told me that I'd have eyes for any Pennywise outside of Tim Curry I'd have torn your arm off and thrown you down a sewage pipe. Especially from a pretty boy like Bill Skarsgard. But I love his perverted baby take, a madman's idea of what might appeal to children with absolutely haunting vocal work. And it's good (and by good I mean horrifying) to get a glimpse of what's under the costume there at the trailer's end.
-- The glimpses we get of the Chinese Restaurant scene also makes me smile, since that scene is one of few and far between highlights of the adult section of the 1990 miniseries. The hope here is that they take the couple things that series got right and drop them into a much better rounded take.
NO
-- As always with this big budgeted horror movies the biggest threat is that big budget itself -- big CG set-pieces almost always look fake and take me right out of the scares. Horror needs to feel right there at your fingertips to truly dig into you, claw inside, you've got to feel the mud and grime and smell the decay. There are several shots in this trailer where the scenery's swirling about that make me worry the practical, the human touch of these kids' trauma stretched across their whole sad lives, might get swept up in a flurry of pixels.
MAYBE SO
-- That said some of that budget does look great here. The funhouse mirror scene in particular is looking pretty (no I don't just mean James McAvoy in jeans) but there are images scattered about -- tidal waves of red balloons and that blasted clown's distended doggie tongue -- that remind how Muschietti made good use of having some cash on hand the first time around. He's got a good eye for wrong things.
-- Of course the big question mark is how they're going to end the film. The book ends real real weird, and the miniseries crapped out a gigantic spider. Some of the aforementioned CG spectacle we see in the trailer is probably from whatever they've decided to do with the end, but finding a path through King's lurid phantasmagoria towards something explicable on a screen is fraught. We shall see!
We shall see on September 6th in particular, since that's when It: Chapter Two ushers in that autumnal movie mood. Now sound off in the comments -- are y'all ready for another Pennywise rendezvous or what?