THE RAGE: CARRIE 2
Carrie is one of my favorite films. It's a masterfully crafted gothic fairy tale and one of the best teen angst movies ever made. Carrie is a realistic outcast. She's not a cool outcast like Winona Ryder sometimes plays, or like Samantha Mathis in Pump Up the Volume. Carrie wouldn't have fit in at my high school. She looks genuinely plain - no glasses, either - she is socially awkward in a believable way, and her religious zealot mother is so vividly nuts that you can believe poor Carrie would be put in the humiliating situation of having her first period in the gym shower without knowing what's happening to her. Brian DePalma's virtuoso technique squeezes dread - not suspense, but dread - out of your stomach like it's orange juice. All the pieces fall into place - the prom queen, the bucket of blood, the rope, the telekinetic explosion yearning for release. You know exactly what's going to happen and DePalma knows that you know, and he makes you waaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiit for it in beautifully agonizing slow motion. And because it's such a great movie, and because it's almost as old as I am, and because the titular protagonist ends up pretty damn dead in the end, it's just not cool to make a sequel to it. My expectations were low. For me, there is a precedent for uneccessary sequels that turn out surprisingly good, because I really enjoyed last year's badly titled Halloween: H20 - Twenty Years Later. It's a better movie than The Rage: Carrie 2, with a fantastic third act and with the advantage of capping off a series of bad sequels (rather than being the first). Because of H20, I tried to keep an open mind about this sequel, although I also figured lightning couldn't strike twice when it comes to unwanted sequels to '70s horror classics. Well, it didn't, but it could have been worse. Standing on its own, The Rage isn't all that bad. It doesn't all work, but it has its strengths, and it doesn't feel very similar to other teen oriented horror films of the late '90s. The best thing about the movie is Emily Bergl, who plays Rachel, the also telekinetic half sister of Carrie White. Her performance (aside from the climactic telekinetic rampage) is believable and charismatic. She's good looking in a non-movie star type of way, and the writers wisely don't cast her as an ugly duckling or a freak. When I first saw the poster for the movie, I worried that they were replacing Carrie with a hipster outcast. Fortunately, they don't push the outcast angle (or the hipster, for that matter). Rachel isn't one of the popular kids, and that's all. She's not Carrie White awkward - she even dates. And to my surprise, it works. She's a different type of character, she's not a sub-Carrie, and that's fortunate. The two villainous football players are also well cast. One of them looks too old to be in high school, but his bulky frame and hairy upper lip are dead on. The other one is played by Zachary Ty Bryan from Home Improvement. I think he's supposed to be some type of teen hearthrob, but he's a hideously ugly chunk of smirk and freckles, and I think he may have really been on the football team at my high school. It's nice to see a high school movie that acknowledges that ugly - but not fat (the Varsity Blues clause) - football players can still be the popular kids just because they play sports with the popular kids. The plot works surprisingly well for something that mirrors the original Stephen King derived plot. There is another cruel prank at a social gathering that leads to telekinetic mayhem, but the prank and the way it unfolds is different enough from the original that it doesn't seem very formulaic. In most ways, Carrie 2 captures high school life more accurately than other teen films of the '90s. Rachel's room actually looks like a real bedroom. She has Marilyn Manson posters on her wall but it's not pushed on us as a mark of rebellion. She's not much of a type, she's into a lot of different things. She listens to Billie Holiday and has a close relationship with her dog. (I didn't buy that she and her best friend would have matching tattoos that they would touch and say "Best buds," but hey, you can't win 'em all.) The dialogue isn't flowery, self-referential or steeped in pop culture. (There is a somewhat awkward conversation about the band Garbage, but it is more an attempt at illustrating the social connection high school kids feel through music than it is a Tarantino or Williamsonism.) Occasionally I was impressed by bits of dialogue that struck me as realistic teenspeak (Rachel playfully telling her friend "You suck," the football player's use of the word "dude"). The only thing that marks this is as a post-Scream horror flick is an amusing bit where a villain asks "What's your favorite scary movie?" over the phone - in a Donald Duck voice. Unfortunately, these strengths aren't enough to hold up the whole movie. The biggest connections to the first film are the ones that don't work. Amy Irving returns as Sue Snell, whose plight was so moving in the first film. She really means to help Carrie but she fails, and ends up getting almost as raw of a deal as Carrie. Now Sue is a guidance counselor who discovers Rachel's secret and tries to get her help before history repeats itself. The premise is sound, but the execution is weak. Sue seems tagged on to make the sequel official. Most of her scenes are separate from Rachel, visiting Rachel's mother in the inappropriately named Arkham Asylum, driving around trying to find Rachel only to be given a sudden, meaningless (if rather spectacular) death. Perhaps if DePalma were directing, Sue's scenes would have been tense, suspenseful, a race against the clock. But the timing is all off. She never seems like she exists in the same timeline as the other characters. And she's just not as interesting as she used to be anyway. Worst of all, she keeps having flashbacks of footage from the first film, which remind you how much more stylish it was and how badly you wish the theater had accidentally been shipped a pristine new print of the original, not the sequel.
There are a few more subtle homages to the original that aren't bad, in particular a shot in the opening scene where red paint drips on a Virgin Mary icon (a surrogate prom queen). Most of the stylistic flourishes are annoying instead of captivating. The colors are not as vivid as DePalma's, but then they keep switching to black and white. Not striking black and white, just bad TV trying to be arty black and white. A character who carries a camcorder is used, a few times, as an excuse for cheesy video POV shots. But then they try to get really fancy schmancy with two football players talking while highlight films are projected on to them, which is odd since we already have the camcorder character so we know this team would just use a VCR. Things really fall apart at the climax. The action is stilted and sprinkled with Hellraiser 3 style deaths. Bergl, sadly, falls into a pale imitation of Spacek's wide eyed trance in the original. Most uncomfortably, a sample of Piper Laurie's "They're all gonna laugh at you!" squawk is incorporated into a Super Mario Brothers-esque techno song. (The scoring throughout the film is cheesy, especially when compared to Pino Donaggio's lush orchestral work.) Not surprisingly, there's an epilogue tag vaguely inspired by the legendary Carrie's-hand scene. Also not surprisingly, it's not very effective. Fortunately, it doesn't seem to set up much of a Carrie 3. For that, they'd need to go really off the wall. I suggest Carries, the story of the military's experiments in genetically engineered telekinetic warriors, all played by Sissy Spacek.
I'm glad Carrie 2 isn't as bad as I'd expected, and that I got some enjoyment out of it. But I still wish it hadn't been made. The aspects that work are pretty admirable, but it's just not worth it. I just don't like the idea of Carrie becoming Carrie 1.
--Bryan Frankenseuss Theiss
"I write rhymes so fresh I try to bite my own verses." --Tash
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