There may have been more than 30 Stephen King adaptations over the years, but only a handful – Carrie, The Shawshank Redemption, Stand By Me, The Shining, Misery – have become timeless. Alas, this 1990 three-hour two-part TV miniseries just isn’t one of them. Based on King’s doorstopper novel, It relates the story of seven friends from Derry, Maine, who – in 1960 aged 10 – take on Pennywise the Dancing Clown (Tim Curry), a supernatural being/giant spider/alien who’s responsible for the deaths of countless children.

Brought together 30 years later by a promise they made as kids to return to Derry should the killings begin again, the adults are forced to relive the hallucinatory horrors of their childhood. Certain compromises have inevitably been made in shoehorning King’s 1,000-plus pages into three hours, but the main problem with Tommy Lee Wallace’s bland adaptation lies in its made-for-network-TV origins, with a cast comprised of B-actors (John Ritter being the exception) and, more importantly, a complete absence of scares, with only Curry’s creepy clown mustering anything close to a thrill.

BEST BIT A drain, a clown, a grab... Stuff of nightmares.

DVD Extras:

Tellingly, Wallace confesses on the disc’s sole extra (a cut’n’paste commentary recorded in 2002, which also features Ritter) that he hadn’t even read the book. It shows. For King completists only.