Critics hail the new take on Stephen King's It as 'a dark Stand By Me'

Hopes that the remake of Stephen King’s ‘It’ will pull the US box office out of its worst summer for decades have been bolstered by a raft of decent reviews.

Critics have hailed the new horror – though not without reservation, and not merely because of its terrifying child entertainer antagonist, Pennywise, played by Bill Skarsgard.

The young cast appear to have stolen the show, one notice likening director Andres Muschetti’s movie to ‘a dark Stand By Me’.

Set in the 80s, it finds a group of outcast teens targeted by an evil shape-shifting creature who has stalked their small town in Maine for decades.

‘Midnight Special’s Jaeden Lieberher and ‘Stranger Things’ Finn Wolfhard are among the cast, and it appears to be akin with the latter show’s nostalgic vibes.

At the time of publishing (and likely to change a little), the movie has a 100% ‘fresh’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes, though this shows up the pitfalls of taking the increasingly influential site’s ratings at face value – most reviews, while positive, do point out that it employs a wealth of well-worn horror movie tropes along the way.

Jamie Graham in Total Film writes: “The real reason IT works is because it takes time with the kids, revelling in their colourful lingo and comradeship as much as their fears.”

“The film works beautifully as a straight-arrow genre piece, and a portrait of young people taking command of their own destiny,” David Jenkins adds in Little White Lies.

But in Entertainment Weekly, Chris Nashawaty notes a few more of its shortcomings: “It is essentially two movies. The better by far (and it’s very good) is the one that feels like a darker Stand by Me — a nostalgic coming-of-age story about seven likable outcasts riding around on their bikes and facing their fears together. Part of me kept waiting for a voice-over from Richard Dreyfuss: ‘And that was the best summer of my life…’

“Less successful are the sections that trot out Pennywise. The more we see of him, the less scary he becomes. Unless you’re really afraid of clowns, he just seems kind of cartoony after a while.”

Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian adds: “This is an ensemble smorgasbord of scariness, or maybe a portmanteau of petrification, throwing everything but the haunted kitchen-sink at the audience in the cause of freaking us out.

“But the problem is that almost everything here looks like route one scary-movie stuff that we have seen before: scary clowns, scary old houses, scary bathrooms.”

So good – or at least not terrible – news for fans of Stephen King’s book, but it’s perhaps not quite the perfect movie its Rotten Tomatoes score appears to suggest.

It’s due out on September 8 across the UK.

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