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 REVIEW Blood Sisters It's hard to beat Carrie. The original symbol of grrl power led many oppressed outcasts to fantasize about payback. Now the horror heroine lends her anger to a sequel, but the results are hardly terrifying.
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The Rage: Carrie 2 Rated R Now showing For many female misfits aimlessly wandering the country's high-school halls, Carrie White is an icon. Before Shirley Manson and Courtney Love there was the film Carrie, where a sheltered, shy outcast (Sissy Spacek) got her revenge on the Heathers of the world. For many, she remains the patron saint of adolescent angst. She is a bloody reminder of the awkwardness of burgeoning womanhood, a powerful statement against the cruel hierarchy of high school and a vision of revenge that reaches religious proportions. With a psychosexual luridness that is impossible to shake even years later, Brian DePalma's 1976 Carrie is a hard act to follow. Carrie White's tragic and victorious story is to some a campy horror spectacle, to others a perfect example of an expertly made, Hitchcock-soaked film. To many teenage girls, Carrie remains a personal triumph. One anonymous teen asserted her feelings for Carrie on a Carrie 2 message board on America Online: "More power to Carrie for fighting the bitches that are always present in high school. The popular crowd needs someone with kick-ass powers and one hell of a temper to teach them to get rid of their holier than thou attitude.... Don't you people realize that in the real world your prickish attitudes won't last a minute?... I'm gonna' laugh the day I see you fall!" This girl is the target audience for Carrie's terrible yet oddly intriguing sequel. It is 20 years after Carrie White's infamous prom-night massacre at the appropriately named Bates High School. A lonely young woman named Rachel (Emily Bergl) is living at home with her pitiful, white-trash adoptive parents. Rachel's biological mother was institutionalized, apparently traumatized because she believed young Rachel was possessed by Satan. Rachel's life of sadness and maladjustment takes a horrific turn when her only friend kills herself by jumping off the roof of the school and landing face-first on a car windshield. The friend kills herself because she is dumped by a jock who deflowered her and then called her a "skank." Sue Snell (Amy Irving), the school guidance counselor, seeks out the teen and reveals that she is the only survivor of the Carrie catastrophe so many years ago. She also claims to know why Rachel is different from others. According to Snell, Rachel's natural father was also Carrie White's daddy, and she has inherited his power of telekinesis. Believing that Snell is a wacko, Rachel leans more towards the comforting arms of Jesse, a nice football player (Jason London), and loses her virginity to him. Soon she is blossoming and gaining friends. But Rachel, like Carrie, has been set up. One humiliating night, at the most important party of the year, the popular kids (excluding her lover) cruelly laugh at her. And as we are promised in the film's title, Rachel unleashes her rage. She explodes with such gory, over-the-top gusto that we almost forget how bad the picture has been for most of its running time and begin to enjoy Rachel's methods of mass destruction. Heads are chopped off, CDs fly through teen bodies and one popular chick even gets the same treatment as Moe Green in The Godfather: Her glasses shatter right into her bleeding eyes before she collapses and dies. But the film's final blood bath isn't enough to compensate for the weakness in building up Rachel's deadly force. Rachel is depicted as a smart, likable chick who loves her dog and digs Billie Holiday. Unlike Carrie, she's not downcast and mousy; she has a tattoo and wears sexy, navel-revealing clothes. Any smart punk-rocker guy would be in love with her. She certainly wouldn't fall for a dorky football player, even the charming Jesse. The picture also shows an alarming amount of hatred for popular kids and jocks. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but the vitriol is so strident you would think Andrea Dworkin was directing under a pseudonym. When Rachel's friend kills herself, we are supposed to side with those who want to lock up the dead girl's Lothario on statutory-rape charges. In the original Carrie, the high schoolers were awful, but there was a perverse joy in seeing sexy bitch Nancy Allen and boy-toy doofus John Travolta annihilated at the end of the film. The first Carrie was about bloody womanhood wreaking havoc on an entire school (hell hath no fury like a menstruating woman scorned), but the second is a poorly made piece of inflammatory feminism. This movie doesn't know what to do with the metaphorical power of blood that runs deep and angry among its target audience of female misfits, who will be disappointed by this sequel. The filmmakers should worry about the disrespect they have shown the original--some girls don't like to be crossed.
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