It

So I have this movie nerd friend who is getting a bit on the crusty side when it comes to age yet he still has a thing for younger girls and every now and then has these weird wet dreams about having sex with Helena Bonham Carter in a monkey suit. I’m not quite sure what exactly caused with the latter but hey, he lives in the country suburbs of Dallas and things get a bit boring out there, so I’ll give him a free pass. Well the other day he called me out of the blue to tell me that Kate Becksinsale’s daughter just posted some pics of herself online in a bathing suit. Beckinsale’s daughter is 18. Now I too am on the wrong side of crusty and I also happen to have an affinity for younger women but even that’s pushing it for me. But I am a dude so I had to at least pop in and see for myself, and just as I suspected, she looked like she was freaking twelve years old! I nearly vomited my Chuck-E-Cheese pizza!

After cussing my friend out for a bit, I came to the sad realization that I had just recently began following R. Kelly on Instagram. And it was in that moment that I began questioning some of my life’s decisions. Why was I talking to a dude who was drooling over a teen in swimwear and following #morningswithKellz on my phone? I know there’s not a law against that just yet but maybe there should be!

What’s the point of all this, you ask? I forgot how innocent we once were as kids. In the latest film adaptation of Stephen King’s creepy novel It, the story focuses on a group of outsider kids who crack funny sex jokes about each other’s moms with regularity while having to face their greatest fears through the eyes of an insane clown. I remember making similar jokes as a kid when I’d say something like "Oh, I have a black pen you can borrow but it only writes in white ink" but I had no idea what it really meant at the time. Or maybe I did and I’ve always been a twisted individual; either way, it was great reminiscing about the good ole days, when sexual harassment started at a young age even if you had no clue what you were really talking about. Okay clearly I’m joking, I would never condone that kind of behavior but in It, you do see how sex is always on the brain of boys even at a young age.

Now most people know the story of It at this point but for those who may have forgotten, it’s about this creepy clown who appears in this small town in northeast America to prey on little kids and their fears. He tricks them into getting close enough to him to eat them without leaving any trace of their existence behind. And apparently everyone in the town is so freaked out by these random occurrences that no one takes the initiative to figure out what’s really going on. Well one kid, Bill (St. Vincent, Midnight Special, and The Book of Henry’s Jaeden Lieberher) refuses to give up on his little brother who’s also gone missing, so he rallies his band of misfits who include his close friend Richie (Stranger Things’s Finn Wolfhard) and his secret crush Beverly to try and find the source of the town’s strange disappearances.

Well along the way, you see friendships tested as these kids are forced to grow up in a hurry in an attempt to survive this killer clown who apparently has no mercy. And you are also exposed to some pretty dark material like a sexually abusive father, a controlling mother who puts Kathy Bates in The Waterboy to shame, and a small child getting his arm bitten off in a pretty gruesome scene. But having said that, the film itself isn’t so much scary as it is creepy. Don’t get me wrong, every scene with the clown will stick in your mind for quite some time but any scene with zombies falls kind of flat due to the fact that we’ve been exposed to better makeup and gorier scenes on The Walking Dead on a weekly basis.

But this is by far the best Stephen King adaptation that has ever made it to the big screen. It’s fun, funny, and serves its purpose as a great appetizer to get you ready for the Halloween season. I definitely recommend popping in as I give it a rating of very FRESH!