Film
When children in the town of Derry begin disappearing, hunted by a shape shifting demon, Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård – Atomic Blonde) who has take the form of a clown, a group of local kids gang up to search for the cause. One of them, Bill Denbrough (Jaeden Lieberher) has lost his brother, Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott). These seven kids must face their own fears, when they vow to rid the world of this evil.
Based on the novel by horror master Stephen King (The Dark Tower), IT brings the scares. Scares that are not just cheap jump-scares. These are psychological. The film plays on ones mind, prompting memories of childhood fears, adulthood phobia. IT sucks you in, chews your mind up, and spits you out just in time for a scene in the film to have some really funny moments. There are doses of nostalgia, with the film set in the 80’s, prompting self-debate on when innocence ends and one is no longer safe to venture out in one’s own town.
It, a horror, with an adventure story, and one with really good rewatch value. One of the classics, that has been brought into the new millennium. Certainly a disc to add to a home movie collection.
Read the full SAMDB review of It.
Disc
Overall, the disc for It is of a good technical quality, with a good film, and one bonus feature.
It is available now, to purchase on disc, in South Africa.
Video
Video is encoded at a high average bitrate, with no visible artefacts on-screen. There is no visible colour bleed, and detail in the several darker scenes is good. Colours are vibrant as needed throughout the film.
Video on the menu system is very plain, with the static backgrounds, and so still looks good.
Viewers with the necessary hardware or software can scale up to a larger or higher resolution screen, should they wish.
Audio
Audio is presented in a Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack, and encoded at a high average bitrate. Dialogue is clear via the centre channel, with music and environment audio being pushed via the front channels. Good use is made of the surround channels to expand the on-screen world, and further draw the viewer into the story.
Audio for the included deleted and extended scenes is presented in a Dolby Digital 2.0 soundtrack.
Navigation
The main menu is static, with accompanying background music.
Navigation is simple, with standard template icons for the main menu. These do have text labels. There are menu buttons to play the main feature, scene selection, languages, and deleted scenes.
The scene selection sub-menus each contain five large, colour, still thumbnails, for a total of fourteen chapters. While these thumbnails are numbered, they are not labelled, nor is there a chapter listing in the packaging, meaning that an amount of guesswork is required in order to navigate to a specific part of the main feature.
The languages sub-menu allows one to select the audio language, including descriptive audio. There are also options to choose a subtitle language, if one is desired.
The deleted scenes sub-menu launches this one bonus feature, directly from the main menu.
Bonus Features
There are a collection of deleted and extended scenes included on the disc. Each is prefixed by an on-screen text title. The first one in particular is a bit of a departure from the fear and horror of the main feature, and is actually rather funny.
Packaging
Packaging is rather basic and standard, with a poster on the front of the packaging, matching the image that is feature on the main menu, with the now iconic yellow rain jacket, and red balloon.
The back of the packaging has a brief synopsis, a few stills from the main feature, and the usual technical labelling one would expect.
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