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Review / ‘IT Follows’ (MA) *

IT FollowsSHORTLY after Easter I received an email touting the Australian release of “David Robert Mitchell’s independent horror feature ‘IT Follows’ ’’, asserting that “IT” had “stormed the US speciality box office over its opening weekend (March 13-15) recording the highest screen average of any film release in 2015 with $40,000. ($160,089 total gross off four prints)”.

That box-office performance strikes me as a publicist trying to drum up excitement about a film that is as scary as a bowl of custard. Jay (Maika Monroe) thinks somebody, something, is stalking her with malicious intent. If IT touches her, IT will transfer IT’s nasty powers to her and so on along in a kind of pass-the-parcel game.

The teens waiting for something unpleasant to strike aren’t the sharpest pencils in anybody’s box. A major sequence involves them arranging turned-on electric devices around a swimming pool, ready to hurl into the water when the pursuing nemesis jumps in. This forebodes a presumption that the electrical arrangements in the pool building have no fuses or circuit breakers. Yikes!!

The Disasterpeace soundtrack effectively conveys the notion of horrible without musicality or apparent concern for whether or not it reflects the moment’s action. Many sequences use Francois Truffaut’s theme for his 1973 Oscar-winning film “Day For Night” satirising the effect of a filter over the lens to give a scene shot in daylight the effect of being at night.

There is a market for horror films. “IT Follows” does not bring cinematic quality to it. And measuring a film’s intrinsic merit by its box-office performance is to my mind unprofessional.

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Dougal Macdonald

Dougal Macdonald

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