It’s been fifty years since Brian De Palma bought us the first of many, many Stephen King adaptations, based on the man’s first ever book supposedly saved from the wastepaper basket. And for all the oscillating quality of King movies from ‘classics of their age’ to ‘demented garbage made by drunken clowns’, the 1976 Carrie film remains iconic—despite the other attempts at translating the story, including most recently a whole series of Amazon. Perhaps it’s because its story of a psionically gifted bully victim lashing out still resonates over the decades, moreso now in fact after such issues get more scrutiny. And one of the lesser known takes was the sequel from 1999, Carrie II: The Rage…which doesn’t actually have Carrie in it, but, er, let’s take a look anyway.
The film almost feels like another project that had the name slammed onto it and the script hastily adjusted, and that’s because it basically was. Director Katt Shea had to take over a mess of a production, though lead Emily Bergl was locked in from the start. Amy Irving reprises her role from the original as Sue, a teacher who tried to reach out to the titular Carrietta, but to no avail—and even then she feels somewhat perfunctory.
Honestly, the general story of the film is surprisingly more resonant than you’d think—based on the Spurs Posse controversy of the time (essentially, a bunch of dudebro student athletes committing sexual assault as part of some points contest), we have here a group of high school meathead football players doing the same thing, driving one girl to suicide. One of her friends is Rachel (Bergl), who turns out to be the half-sister of Carrie, and ends up getting entwined in getting some justice done on this group, though not without pushback that ends as well as you may think.
Bergl tries the best with what she’s given but Rachel is essentially written as another nineties pseudo-goth would-be, and that’s kind of the thing—Spacey Spacek in the original exuded sympathy, and you felt for her being tormented by her fundamentalist mother. There’s less hook here, apart from trying to get justice for her friend, but even that isn’t as dealt with as well as it should be.
In fact, the whole film feels much more rooted in its decade than the original—which sure had all sorts of overdone seventies fashion, but still holds up in many aspects. Here, we get wonky effects, grunge, inexplicable black and white like we’re entering a music video…and even flying killer CDs, I kid you not. The ending sequence where everything goes crazy actually had me chuckle at several points, and it’s nothing on the De Palma climax of fire and pig’s blood.
I draw all these comparisons to the first because the film keeps doing so, but not as well. It’s frustrating, as had it been made a decade or two later, there would be probably at least some more effort made with the opportunity to take about toxic masculinity and abuses being overlooked that this touches on and comes very close to actual commentary at times. Otherwise, as its own film its not unwatchable, but if you want something in this vein from around the turn of the millennium, stick to Ginger Snaps.
Comments
Post a Comment