IT Welcome to Derry just dropped its first episode and this thing surprised me in many many aspects. HBO really threw some serious money at this thing because it does not look like your regular TV series at all, it looks and feels like you are watching another IT movie, the production value is insane and you can tell they did not cheap out on this one. The episode show us a group of kids trying to figure out what happened to this missing boy named Matty, and things get dark real fast, you got these two air force guys dealing with their own stuff at the military base while the kids are running around Derry trying to solve this mystery and Pennywise is obviously behind all the creepy shit going down so two "seperate" for not plots. The episode for been the first one is very brutal, like they are not playing around here, multiple kids get taken out and I mean killed not just scared or injured actually dead. One of them was funny as hell too and I was pissed when that happened because you get attached to these kid actors fast, they are all really good, the whole theater sequence where everything goes to hell is intense and the special effects work better than I expected definitely better than IT movies in my opinion.
- IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt19244304/
- Platform: HBO MAX
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The opening scene is absolutly nightmare fuel, this kid Matty is at the movies watching a musical called "The Music Man" and he sneaks in because apparently his home life is trash, you can tell something is off with this kid right away because he is sucking on a pacifier and he has a black eye. He runs out of the theater trying to get away from Derry and this nice looking famly picks him up saying they are going to Portland but something feels wrong from the start, the mom calls the daughter a whore the dad makes weird coments about vasectomies and the little girl is sticking her fingers in raw liver trying to make Matty smell them which is gross as hell. Then things go completly insane, they keep driving in circles back to Derry even though they never turn around and the mom starts giving birth to this mutant baby thing with wings that looks like it came straight out of hell, the whole family is laughing and the moms swinging this thing around by its umbilical cord sprinkling blood all over the windows. Its one of the most disturbing things I have seen on TV in a long time and it sets the tone for the rest of the episode, you know right away this show is not messing around when it comes to gore and killing fkn kids, I thought they were going to tame it down, they are going full horror and I love that they committed to it. The scene ends with Mattys pacifier flying out the window into the sewer which is a nice callback to Georgies boat in the first IT movie, you know this kid is dead or taken or whatever Pennywise does to kids when he grabs them and it happens in the first ten minuts of the show.
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Four months later we meet the rest of the kids and they are basically the 1960s version of the Losers Club, you got Lily who is the main girl and she has some serious trauma because her dad died in a pickle factory accident which sounds ridiculous but the way they show it is actually really messed up. Then theres Phil who is obsessed with aliens and thinks the military is hiding something at the air base, Teddy who is a quiet Jewish kid getting ready for his bar mitzvah and dealing with family stuff about the Holocaust and later we meet Ronnie who is the daughter of the guy who runs the movie theator where Matty went missing. These kids start having visions of Matty calling out to them from the sewers and drains, Lily hears him in her bathroom which is exactly like what happened to Beverly in the first IT movie, Teddy sees this horrifying lampshade made of human skin in his bedroom which connects to his fear about concentration camps, and they all realize something is seriously wrong in Derry. The show does a great job making you care about these kids real quick, they feel like actual people not just horror movie victims waiting to die and the actors playing them are all solid, you can tell they put effort into casting kids who could actually act instead of just finding random child actors who look the part. The whole mystery around Matty keeps building and the kids decide to go to the library to research what happened, they find newspaper articles about other disappearences in Derry and you start seeing how this town has a pattern of weird shit happening every few years which lines up with Pennywises 27 year cycle from the movies and books, they dont go into specifics of this cycle but its something I learn from watching the movies, would be nice to re watch after Season 1 is over.
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The final scene at the movie theater is where everything goes to hell, I enjoy it so much because they really send it and it works so well, even tops out the first horror scene in the car with Matty. The kids go back to watch The Music Man because they think Matty was trying to send them a message and at first its just them sitting there feeling guilty about not being better freinds to him, each of them start crying for it. Then the movie starts and Matty appears on screen with that family from the beginning, he starts talking directly to the kids blaming them for what happened to him and then that mutant baby bursts through the screen and starts killing everyone. It grabs Teddy and bites him, it tears Phil apart in the air and rips off his little sisters arm while she is screaming for help, the whole thing is brutal and gory way more than I expected from a TV show and it happens so fast. Only Lily and Ronnie survive and Lily is left standing there holding the little girls arm like some kind of nightmare, its a dope ending for the first episode because now you know nobody is safe and any of these characters can die at any moment, I really thought it was going to be more build up before we start dishing characters. Most shows would have kept these kids alive for at least half the season to build up their stories but Welcome to Derry just kills them off the rip and makes you get worried about who is going to make it, I was not expecting them to go that hard but I respect the hell out of it. The special effects in this scene are really good too, that baby creature looks terrifying and disgusting and the gore does not look cheap, you can tell HBO gave them a real budget to work with and they used it well, even though the scene is very dark you still se a lot of the killing and the baby bat monster too.
Overall this first episode is way more than I expected from an IT prequel series, it respects the source material while doing its own thing, the scares are actually scary, the characters feel real and the production quality is way higher than most TV horror shows. I love that they set it in the 1960s because it gives them room to play with different time periods in future seasons, Im not a Stephen King Universe geek but I do know Dick Halloran from The Shining and the Paul Bunyan statue that terrorizes Richie in IT Chapter 2. The show is all in to be disturbing and violent which is what IT should be, this is not some watered down network TV version of the story, definetly not of kids at least under 15, its a real horror show that scares you with very dark stuff. I am very excited to see where they take this and whether Lily is going to end up in a mental hospital because nobody will believe her about the mutant baby killing her friends, at least thats what appears from the trailer, the setup for the rest of the season is strong and if they can keep this level of quality going it will be one of the best horror shows in years. 9 out of 10 for me, if you are a fan of IT or Stephen King or just good horror in general you need to watch this.
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