Review – It!

As usual, the exclamation point in the title is a strong forewarning about the quality of the picture. The assistant curator (Roddy McDowall) of a museum has relatively simple problems: an unrequited crush on a co-worker and his mother’s corpse hanging out Psycho-like in his living room. But then his employer acquires a new statue, an ugly, Ronald-Reagan-looking piece that turns out to be the notorious Golem of Prague. Our anti-hero figures out how to pop the secret compartment in its foot that contains its activation scroll. Needless to say, he immediately starts using it to cater to his own selfish desires. At first his schemes make sense, such as when he has it kill the curator who tries to fire him. But then his golem-centered plots become more and more bizarre. Eventually he gets the thing to topple a bridge thinking that this will somehow impress the woman he loves. And as the golem’s crimes spiral out of control, so does the response from the authorities, including trying to destroy the thing with a nuclear bomb. Though this isn’t actually a Hammer Studios production, director Herbert J. Leder deliberately tried – with reasonable success – to give the movie a Hammer look and feel. Mildly amusing