Movie review: The blood, the agony of prom, and 'Carrie'

Something is rotten in the schools of Middle America. No, it’s not guns; it’s cyberbullying. And blonde, socially awkward, and terribly shy, Carrie White (Chloe Grace Moretz) is its latest victim.

“Carrie” is the third adaptation of Stephen King’s original 1974 novel that tells the tale of a timid and put-upon small town girl, whose telekinetic powers bloom when the jocks and popular girls in her school take their bullying too far. It’s basically “Mean Girls” meets X-Men’s Jean Grey as puréed by King’s horror scribe brain.   

We open at Ewen High School where, in the girl’s locker room, young nerd Carrie experiences her very first period.  Having a mother who’s bonkers in the head, nobody’s told Carrie about this so, naturally, the poor girl breaks down and thinks she’s bleeding to death.

All the screaming and pleas for help attract attention and soon Carrie’s surrounded by her classmates handing her tampons and feminine pads. Soon, they’re throwing stuff at her and taunting her. Resident meanie Chris Hargensen (Portia Doubleday) quickly whips out her phone and takes a video and, later in the film, uploads it to YouTube. Naturally, right?

All this happens before the gym class teacher Ms. Desjardin (Judy Greer) can rescue Carrie. What a life event for a girl in her last three months of her senior year.

Two things to know before we proceed: the pace of this movie is veeeeery slow and, if you were expecting an awesome special FX blow-out with the huge prom at the end that updates the 1976 version with our current whiz-bang-kaboom Hollywood cinematic technology, you’ve come to the wrong movie, sir.

At its heart, Stephen King’s “Carrie” is a classic because it’s an allegory; the kind of cautionary tale that moves in simple, broad strokes, and is thus made powerful because of its directness and in-your-face confrontationalist stance. Its message: beware whom you push, for even the meek may become monsters. And when the meek do come of age, well, the monster can simply devour you. King’s “Carrie” is disturbing and dark because of the extent that people go to when they can justify they’re just playing a prank.

Okay, having said that, this new adaptation will no doubt be a lightning rod of commentary for fans of Brian De Palma’s version; the one with Sissy Spacek in the titular role.

While its intentions are good, the bad news is that this one is rated-R13; and I think that while such a rating means it’ll get to be seen by more audiences, it really castrated the power and viscerality that was present in the original novel and in De Palma’s version.

I can’t tell you how things get bogged down without revealing too many spoilers, but it feels like a watered-down and almost hipster-ish script under the hand of a non-horror fan—paging director Kimberly Peirce.   

The cast is stellar with talented, if bluntly-used, performances. Especially misused is Oscar-winner Julianne Moore, who plays Carrie’s fanatically religious and batfrak crazy mother Margaret. Her portrayal of the misguided and overprotective soul warped by Catholic guilt—so crippled she’s unable to care for her child (in fact she tries to stab the newborn Carrie with a pair of scissors after she gives birth)—drives home the point, but lends dimension to little else. Misusing Moore is almost as big a blunder as the one with Ben Kingsley and “Iron Man 3.” Or using a Porsche to deliver fish to the market.  

Another in the list of sins is the plodding pace that’s like a telekinetic trying to learn her first trick: the process is painfully slow and the payoff is less spectacular than we hoped. You’d also think there’d be more angst and awfulness to be mined from the material of cyberbullying, but it all comes off as anti-climactic, really.

There ARE a few things that the movie has going for it. One of them is the attention to putting the story in the context of a post-9/11, post-Columbine, and post-Sandy Hook age of terror and cyberbullying.

The Ewen high-school administrators clamp down swiftly on Carrie’s bathroom incident, the students who try to show Carrie a good time at the prom are genuinely sincere and almost neo-hippie in their granola earnestness, the small town criminal toughs are informed by the fear of the evidence they might leave behind for the CSI teams.

It’s post-noughties America to a T, all right, Obamacare and all.

Also, as much as I complain about the jigsaw of the cast and their misuse, they ARE A-list actors and their quietly radiant, if slightly caricaturish, roles are fully functional.

Take Chloe Grace Moretz who’s fast becoming the poster girl for young fringe women in movies. She’s already played a vampire (“Let Me In”), a werewolf (“Dark Shadows”), and a very violent superhero (the “Kick-Ass” series), so an abused telekinetic is no problem.  

The casting news for this project had the title role being offered to Lindsay Lohan first. Upon hearing about it, Sissy Spacek was reportedly delighted because she thought Lohan was a great young beauty. Has Spacek seen LiLo post-rehab and post-court battle? In any case, Chloe Grace Moretz is a great choice even if she’s way too pretty to be just an ignored high-school senior.

While I love Moretz (I confess it’s why I wanted this review), even playing the nerd all covered-up, dirty, and nervous, her Boticelli features and curves shine through. Clearly no ugly duckling but already the swan, albeit dressed so drab she might as well be wearing the wallpaper. Perhaps LiLo, features weathered by cocaine and alcohol, would have been a better pick for the whole troubled and sick girl look?     

The few scenes before the climax of the prom slaughter featuring Carrie discovering and testing her powers are very cinematic images; the one where she does an aerial ballet of her books and the furniture in her bedroom is gorgeous and will no doubt be inspiring to tween girls already into vampires, witches, and zombies.  

Speaking of the high school prom at the end, there’s much blood and fire and revenge to rejoice about, and it does fulfil the alleviation of all the frustration I felt for Carrie as the movie progressed, but the slaughter lacks the high gross-out quotient that would make for genuine schadenfreude. But there ARE some surprises: whom Carrie chooses to spare, what happens when she goes back home, and tells mom that she was right all along.

For a horror fan like me (having watched a gamut of genuine film frights and gross-outs so terrible, they’ve become good B-movie fare), THIS version just feels unnecessary and unneeded, especially since the original 1976 version was so remarkable in its Grand Guignol drama.

This version of Carrie’s tale lacks ambition and is a cinematic testament that illustrates how, like in any card game, you can indeed play a strong hand quite badly.

“Carrie” is now showing in all major Metro Manila theaters. — VC, GMA News