I’m ninety-eight percent sure everybody involved in this movie was high as balls the entire time.
It Chapter Two is complete chaos. The director, Andy “What Are Frogs” Muschietti, has stated that he doesn’t want the second movie to be seen as a sequel, but rather the second half of a complete movie, like Kill Bill. But the Kill Bill movies, while being a little uneven with the action sequences, still carries the same tone throughout. Saying It Chapter One and It Chapter Two are two halves of the same movie is like saying the same thing about Remember the Titans and Clash of the Titans. It’s like trying to watch a VHS of Friday the 13th only to find your little sister taped over the back half with Rainbow Bright and the Star Stealer. It’s like that hard left turn The Sound of Music makes in the back half, except instead of Nazis, it’s wobbly old lady boobies.
Horror comedies are obviously a thing, and there’s plenty out there that work. It Chapter Two is trying but it feels like they weren’t trying hard enough. Like, only some of the people with the movie were onboard with the idea of changing the movie to a funnier tone, and the rest weren’t, and they were fighting about it even as they wrapped filming. Even as they wrapped editing. The ending where they destroy the ancient evil cosmic entity by embarrassing it into a clown baby was obviously supposed to be played for laughs, right? But then the people on Team This is Supposed to be a Horror Movie WTF were like ‘this is supposed to be a serious movie, you guys’ and pulled back on the rope but the people on Team Call it the Ritual of CHUD That Movie is Hilarious pulled back on their end and the scene just got stuck in the middle swamp of half-assed comedy which, as we all know: super awkward.
They just kept stepping on each other and ruining scenes that would have been effective in one direction or the other but kept getting stuck in the middle. The scene where Beverly goes back to her childhood apartment and finds Mrs. Kersch, for example, is delightfully ominous and creepy, right up until the naked and rubbery Mrs. Kersch (with the aforementioned wobbly old lady boobies) flings herself at Beverly. Is this supposed to be scary or funny? Because it’s neither. It’s just over the top and weird, especially because that lasts all of four seconds and then Beverly is back in another creepy scene. The same scene, I guess. Team We Just Want to Scare People was working on this great creepy scene, and then some of the folks on Team What if Stephen King Plays a Sassy Bitch showed up and spilled bong water all over the middle of it while giggling and mumbling something about extra mouths, just, everywhere.
Nowhere is the general sense of “Why is any of this happening, actually?” more apparent than in the scene with Eddie Kaspbrak and the Leper. I am just at a total loss with this scene. Adult Eddie goes to the same pharmacy where Pennywise had a whole set piece going involving his mother getting attacked by a leper to scare him and goes into the basement to confront it. The leper is there again and attacks him, but Eddie fights back and actually manages to get the upper hand, right up until the leper barfs black goo all over him…while Juice Newton’s “Angel of the Morning” plays.
Not over the whole scene, mind you, which would be weird enough. It’s only during the two seconds of barfing. It’s literally only long enough for Juice to sing the titular line. And then it’s over. It’s been over a year and I still don’t know why this happened. It’s one of the more baffling things to happen in 2019, and given how fucked up everything has been for years, that’s saying something. When we saw it in theaters we thought it was a mistake, like the wrong audio track had been spliced in. There is nothing in this movie to indicate this song should be playing at this moment. It doesn’t play at any point prior to this, in this movie or the previous one. It’s not calling back to anything. It doesn’t have a significant meaning to the character, and the lyrics aren’t meaningful to the plot. It is a complete non-sequitur. They could have put in Smash Mouth’s “All Star” and gotten the same reaction.
I did the minimal amount of research about this and only found this reddit post where the poster suggest it’s a double Easter egg for both a previous Stephen King work The Langoliers and Deadpool, the latter as a nod to the fact that both movies are rated R and Deadpool featured the song and broke records for highest grossing rated R movie.
K.
Why, though? Because this movie is also rated R? What kind of half-asleep reasoning is that? And we’re going to toss a shout out to The Langoliers? Honey baked Christ, does anyone even remember the television version The Langoliers? The budget for that was $72.45. The computer effects were done in MS Paint. I’m eighty-six percent sure they not only didn’t pay Bronson Pinchot but kidnapped him and held a gun on him the entire time they filmed. An empty gun because they didn’t have the money for bullets.
I can see how, in theory, this is supposed to be funny. If it was supposed to be funny? I think…no, it must have been. Right? Was Team Balloons are Objectively Funny and You’re Not Changing My Mind On This, Darren like, ‘oh, shit, this scene is too scary, we need to put something in there to remind our audience that this is ALSO a goddamn comedy?’ Because…no it wasn’t. It was just sort of gross. And “Angel of the Morning” didn’t make it funny, it just made it confusing.
In conclusion, maybe before you turn the sequel to your horror movie into a horror-comedy you put the pipe down for two minutes and make sure everybody is on the same page about it, mmkay?
High Urban Fantasy Jazz 