“It: Welcome to Derry” made me want to run to Hawkins, Indiana.
HBO’s TV prequel to Stephen King’s epic novel and its filmed adaptations has a few virtues of its own, but mainly plays like a “Stranger Things” knockoff with more twisted but less resonant scare tactics and more annoying children.
Co-created by, among others, siblings Andy (who also directed the first two episodes) and producer Barbara Muschietti, “Derry” feels like a mash-up of their blockbuster “It” movies, King’s “The Mist” and the Duffer brothers’ superior series. Elements cribbed from — sorry, “inspired by” — early, wackazoid Tim Burton and biology-repulsed David Cronenberg add to the show’s derivative, Frankenstein quality.
As for the nostalgia factor, “It’s” 1962 setting in the fictional town of Derry, Maine, isn’t something old that seems new again. Half the book and movies unfold around the same time, as have dozens of other popular shows. But although this series’ atmosphere leans too heavily on mean girls in poodle skirts, the retro business also yields a few dividends.
Opening each episode with “A Smile and a Ribbon” — a creepily upbeat, neurotic people-pleaser ditty recorded in 1956 by the adolescent sister duo Patience and Prudence — while Norman Rockwell images morph with the credits into Cthulhu nightmares, is a perfectly executed pleasure.
Everything about JFK’s last full year in office is referenced with rather blunt but still noteworthy thoroughness. The civil rights struggle, cold war paranoia, military/industrial complex chicanery, CIA LSD experiments, women’s liberation, Native American sovereignty and more are taken quite seriously, even if they just provide a patina of sociopolitical significance to the fright fest fundamentals. Still, it all helps ground the story between surreal horror beats that arrive like clockwork every 15 minutes or so.
And kudos to whoever decided that the Stanley Kubrick sight gag reference should be to 1965’s “Dr. Strangelove” rather than the obvious choice “The Shining.”
Anyway, the franchise’s standard idea of some evil entity lurking beneath the town and messing with everyone’s heads gets worked to death, at least in the first five of eight episodes that HBO provided for reviewers.
While the wicked thing takes its sweet time to manifest in the iconic Pennywise the clown incarnation (that’s Bill Skarsgard releasing the red balloons again, btw), “It” sets quickly to its main function of imposing psychotronic visions on people of what they fear most, then kidnapping, eviscerating or eating them. As always, It is primarily interested in children, and the underage cast here is so vast and expendable it’s almost comical that the show’s publicists felt they had to ask critics not to reveal specifics about any younger characters.
I mean, who could keep track of them all? So I’ll just point out that Clara Stack and Amanda Christine play the real hearts of “Derry.” I’ll also praise the decision to eliminate the most obnoxious children as quickly as possible.
But that doesn’t mean I forgive how so many of the kid actors were encouraged to overact like Disney Channel hyperzombies, nor the clunky, overexplanatory dialog they’re given, which frankly doesn’t deserve subtler delivery.
Kids back then didn’t cuss this much, either.
Black characters are the show’s most interesting adults. The town’s movie theater projectionist Hank (Stephen Rider) is scapegoated for the child disappearances and risks getting railroaded with a one-way ticket to Shawshank Prison. Jovan Adepo’s Leroy Hanlon is a fearless (really; a Korean War wound excised the part of his brain part that registers fright) pilot newly assigned to the nearby Strategic Air Command base. His wife Charlotte (Taylour Paige) defied racists at their last post in Louisiana and isn’t about to let any Yankees get away with it.
Leroy was transferred specifically to help General Shaw (James Remar) unearth and master the hopefully weaponizable fear entity detected under Derry’s streets and nearby Indian burial grounds. Also key to that effort is enlisted man Dick Halloran (Chris Chalk in the show’s meatiest performance), a psychic who can get on It’s wavelength more effectively — and therefore more traumatically — than anybody else.
What do folks see when the monster melts their brains? The Muschiettis and company have dreamed up a grotesque gallery of hallucinations that often have real world consequences. They’re so bizarre that it’s sometimes hard to determine whether to laugh them off or be very afraid.
Some writing room Freudian case was big on birth horror. There are several sequences involving demon babies and umbilical cords gone wild. There’s also chopped-up daddy parts in pickle jars and eyeballs that bulge out like, um, sausages.
Not all of It’s delusions are reproductively themed, but many are populated by monstrously mutated loved ones. Predictable, as is that kid thriller staple, a bicycle chase, this time in a haunted cemetery. It being “It,” most everyone winds up in the sewers, where the only sense they can rely on is how bad it stinks.
While most of “Derry’s” supernatural stretches deliver gross satisfaction in the moment, few bear the primal oomph we experience in the Upside Down (as if to approximate that, this show’s cameras sometimes pull vertical 180s). Yes, “It” the book came out well before “Stranger Things” appeared, as did the beloved 1990 miniseries that no doubt inspired the Duffers.
But “Welcome to Derry” feels like a lesser imitation of the Netflix phenomenon in almost every way. “Things” mythology and monsters are cooler, the characters are generally richer with more complex psychology, and the evocation of smalltown 1980s isn’t as hamfisted (nor anachronistic) as this show’s early ‘60s.
Additionally, if there’s now an “It” verse, weren’t the Losers’ Club kids running around Derry at the same time this series is set? Do we not see them because there’s some kind of multiverse factor, as a reading of King could imply? The Muschietti team has certainly set up potentially intriguing storylines in these first five chapters, so who knows where it could all go.
Let’s just hope ”It” heads for more distinctive places than it’s taken us to so far.
“It: Welcome to Derry” premieres Sunday, Oct. 26, on HBO and HBO Max.