Technically this is a Sunday Evening Movie that I watched with my sweetie-wife. I had suffered a migraine attack on Sunday night, and while the wonder medication takes care of the pain, I was left too tired to stay up very late.
It! Is a British film from 1967, so this is not the film with Tim Curry as a terrifying clown.
Roddy McDowall stars as Arthur Pimm a deeply disturbed assistant museum curator. After a devastating fire ruins the artifacts stored at the museum’s warehouse, the curator and Pimm discover a medieval statue undamaged in the rubble. Well, the curator ends up dead and we the audience knows that something is very amiss with that statute.
What made this film so very interesting to me is that the central character, Arthur Pimm, is such a deeply flawed and mentally ill character. Many films will start out with a weak character, and under the pressure and temptation of power, glory, and sex or love, they crack and give in, performing vile deeds until poetic justice at long last catches up with them in the film’s climax. Within very few minutes with It!, we know that this is not the case for Pimm. Pimm’s train derailed long before we met him. Pimm’s introduction very quickly puts him into Norman Bates territory.
Pimm is frustrated professionally, he’s considered too young for the Curator position and is passed over, frustrated sexually, infatuated with a woman who seems unaware of his crush, and unable to cut the apron string from his mother, when a handsom confident American enters the scene, making eyes at Pimm’s crush it is too much for the young man. Discovering the power of the statue, Pimm goes beyond mad into barking at the moon, bat-shit crazy.
While I enjoyed this film, it can be a bit slow. that said any film that ends with a tactical nuke is not all bad.
If you netflix this one it will come on a dis with a second movie, The Shuttered Room. Do Not Watch. I warned you.
