Let Me Assure You That the Original It TV Movie Is Nowhere Nearly as Scary as You Remember

To prepare for Andy Muschietti’s new adaptation of Stephen King’s It, I watched Tommy Lee Wallace’s original two-part tv movie from 1990 this weekend. Like the characters in the movie, I didn’t recall how horrendous this relic from my past was. Hokey, obvious, derivative, horribly acted, incompetently directed, It is no less pleasurable than it was in my youth, it’s just now I appreciate it for its badness as opposed to the fear it attempted to impose on me. Tim Curry is really the only quality thing about it, and indeed it is his performance (which boils down to mere minutes of screen time) that most people think about when they think about this thing.