Horror cycle continued with IT.  Lions saw bits of IT 1990 but it got boring fast & wasn't visually moving.  The downloader got the 1990 & the 2017 version over the last several months.  The IMDB gave the 2017 version a higher rating, though IMDB has no nostalgia for 1990.  The 3 hour 1990 version got rescanned in glorious 1440x1080, as a low budget TV movie.  

 4:3 really looks glorious in the age of vertical video, if only humans had the imagination.

 

Reminds lions of outerscope II's murky 16mm & kid cast.

 

Good idea: 13 year old hottie clenching fists & shooting a slingshot. 

 

Bad idea: 13 year old hottie 35 years later.

 

 

Paper boat in the rain was as far as lions got into the book.  The sunny rain on TV was when lions tuned out.

Skimming through the 5 hours of TV grade production, the 1990 version had a rematch between the antagonist & the kids in adult form.  The 2017 version ended after the kid battle.  The heroine in the 2017 version wasn't a fighter like the 1990 version. 

 

Playing through the painstaking telling of the tale through the introduction of each character, 1 by 1, at 1.5-2x, noted how posh all the present day interiors were.  It wasn't really that posh in 1990, but artist loft, converted warehouse apartments were a big thing.

Square footage was definitely more abundant in those days, as depicted. Population growth has definitely shrunken what is attainable.

 Jobs involving creative output were emphasized.  Making a living as a novelist didn't exist, but jobs involving creating intellectual property were a lot more abundant.

Like all Steven King books, super dark, over the top characters from universal nightmares abound.  It's the abusive father, abusive boyfriend, extreme bullies, extremely protective mom.  Between them all, at least 1 is guaranteed to evoke a bad memory in everyone.  Ben Heck says the female attraction to horror movies is from a desire to be depressed.

 

 

 80's superstar Richard Masur lightened things up a little but didn't last long.  The 1 character who wasn't over the top but downright boring was the antagonist.

 Young lion imagined the clown being very low energy, as if his way of life in the sewer was normal.  A shock factor requires a contrast between the villain's low energy & high danger level.

 

Our hero's mane was featured prominently.  The actor really does have a mole, which aided in recognizing him in the flashbacks.

 

 

The sewer building was a set built on a real lake in Canadia.  

 The IMDB had some material from a real power plant on a lake in Canadia.  Nothing from Buntzen power plant matched, but it would be an exciting place at night.

 

 

 Creature budget finally took off in the last hour.

 

 

 

 The crooked boarding up conveyed the dark memories still inside it.  A man like that could never afford that house now & might have been barely hanging on in 1960 as depicted.  It was boarded up for just 3 seconds of footage.

 

It's a real house in Vancouver, now over $1M.  Formerly working class Canadian neighborhoods definitely have a creepy dystopian aspect to them.  They're all minature versions of lavish houses farther south.  The lines aren't straight.  The windows aren't proportional.

 

 

 

 

Like Graveyard Shift of the same year, we concluded in the villain's lair, an ancient cave network presumably full of aboriginal burial grounds, the sewer was built on top of.   1990 was Steven King's big year, Pet Sematary, Graveyard Shift, & IT all produced in 2 years.

 

The true villain was revealed, a creature who fed on the townpeople every 30 years. 

 Lana Lang finally came unto her own, but lions pondered why only 1 heroine & why the group was so large.  She was quite busy consoling all the dudes.  It took 4 to kill the villain & a few more to die off.

 There was another backstory about the villain controlling people's minds through a heartlight, the same power which allowed the villain to control the entire town's minds.

 

Lana Lang was beautiful in vengeance mode.

 

A good old fist fight & heart removal finally finished off the villain.  They implied the girly boy with the over protective mom died.  Kind of a devastating conclusion for the mom & another horror device.

 

 

 

 

It was all shot in New Westminster, Canadia.  The last scene was Columbia St & 6th St.  

Even though lions pondered if the villain was going to get the last laugh by knocking them off in a wreck, there was something comforting in a tack sharp, super clean, street scene from summer of 1990.  You only feel at home in the time you grew up.