CARRIE
I wish my grad was half this fun

  (here, we call it "grad", and it's not a big deal at all, which is why I went home so early from mine)

Ah, Brian De Palma's Carrie.  Based on the Stephen King book I read in one afternoon in grade ten, this is still probably his best-remembered film, if not his best.

Carrie begins with young Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) losing the volleyball game and getting thwacked for it by most of her teammates as they pack off to the shower, and then a lovingly slow slo-mo cruise through the women's locker room.  The camera cruises past all sorts of half-naked young women enjoying The Best Years Of Their Lives until finally it settles into a particularly foggy corner of the shower, where Carrie is washing herself with what looks like equal parts masturbation and shame.  Then she has that moment which I'm glad I can't relate to; she starts menstruating right there in the shower, to which she reacts with panic and horror well beyond the embarrassment one might expect, which only gets worse with the brutal taunting of her more experienced classmates.

And no wonder; Carrie's mother (Piper Laurie) is puritanical enough to have simply not warned her daughter of the coming of that horribly sinful event that marks her as the bringer of sin into the world (rolling eyes), and after seventeen years, this is the girl's first time and she thought she was bleeding to death.  If mama had had the presence of mind to consider home schooling, surely she would've picked that instead of shipping Carrie off to the cesspool of sin and debauchery that is high school America, but no, she's too busy trying to convert the neighbors.  (I don't know why, but Laurie reminds me of Tori Amos in this movie, even though the notion of Tori Amos trying to convert anybody to Christianity is hilariously unlikely)

Apparently this kind of torment at school is nothing new to Carrie; even one of her teachers mocks her for daring to speak up for once in class.  And any cursory look at Carrie shows that she doesn't (or can't) let this just roll off her back; she gets this kind of shit every day at school, and then goes home to her mother, who she makes an effort to resist but she's always overwhelmed in the end.

Things start looking up for her though, when one of the girls who'd teased her, Sue (Amy Irving), feels guilty enough to essentially pimp out her boyfriend Tommy (William Katt, with HUGE hair) and get him to take Carrie to the prom.  Less magnanimous is Chris (Nancy Allen) and her clique of soulless harpies (sure to make you wish for the right of teachers to bear arms into the classroom), who orchestrate a plan to humiliate the girl there.

Let's see...there's also a young John Travolta as Billy, Chris's boyfriend, P.J. Soles and (against all probability) Edie McClurg as other members of Chris's clique, Betty Buckley as a sympathetic gym teacher, and one very unfortunate pig.

Even though she was the oldest of the "teenaged" cast members (26 or 27 at the time of filming), Spacek is the only one of the bunch who looks like she's 17; everybody else was also in their mid-20's and look it.  No matter what they look like, everybody here serves their purpose; Spacek is appropriately the broken shell with a flicker of light within, Irving, trying to be well-meaning, and Buckley, like the mother we might wish Carrie had in happier circumstances.  Virtually everybody else is human dogshit; they're caricatures, but so were most of the people I went to high school with too.  How 'bout you?

This movie's not without a sense of humor ("Red.  I should've known it would have been red."), but it's understated; laughter is used as a caustic thing here, the product of mockery, not mirth.  The movie almost dares us at points to join in on enjoying Carrie's humiliation, and occasionally, a giggle might be produced even as we're aghast (most amusing has to be Sue's total cluelessness as to the weight of what's going on when she's apprehended in the "Plug it up!" scene).  Mind you, not all of the chuckles are intentional; the movie's overbearing 70's-ness was hilarious when I first saw this movie in high school, and while I inevitably view things with a more mature eye today, it's hard not to snicker at unfortunately-placed lines like "We don't care how we look, do we?".

The score by Pino Donaggio is awful; that it steals from Psycho is bad enough, but the rest of the music vacillates between cloying to sounding like "bow-chicka-wow" porno music.  A scene near the end where a house destroys itself is, well, self-destructive...hearing the creaking of wood giving way was scary.  As soon as the music comes in, the effect is ruined.

There are plot problems here too, though nothing too crippling.  If there was a reason Sue had to sneak into the prom, I missed it.  The super-super-super wacky bent that mama takes at the end of the film seems a little much, and I find it hard to believe that the teacher who is entreated by a student to so suddenly reassign the task of prom-queen ballots would be without his suspicions.

This was De Palma's breakthrough movie, and it shows some promise of things to come (excellent split-screen work), and some indications of things to come that might be more accurately described as threats (note the blindingly over-obvious Christ-symbolism at the end, which hints at the "He's killing her with his dick!  Don't you get it you idiots, he's KILLING her, and he's doing it with his DICK!  The drill is his DICK!" scene in Body Double). (I've come to agree with Ray Garton's interpretation of this scene)  I think his biggest mistake is a lengthy circle-around-the-dancers shot at the prom, where the two dancers are rotating in the opposite direction as the camera's revolution around them, and I swear, if I'd seen that on the big screen, I would've ralphed.

And I don't know if this was part of the movie, or if it just kinda happened on the Space channel when this was aired the other night, but in the scene where Tommy and his friends are trying on tuxes, there's a few seconds which are inexplicably sped up.

I don't know about you guys, but even that Columbine thing hasn't stopped me from looking on at the blood-soaked climax of this movie and taking some satisfaction in seeing these self-absorbed sacks of shit die and die ugly.  Hell, it'd be hard to shed any tears for these people if they'd been soaked in gasoline, lit on fire, and dragged behind a pickup with barbed wire.  And I think this is another problem with the film, though I do admit it's obviously more due to my own prejudices.  Yeah, I was as aghast as the next guy when one lonely sympathetic character is killed in the chaos, but the climax of this film plays for me more like a triumph than a tragedy; God knows there were any number of Chris and Billys I went to school with who, if they'd died horribly, might've been missed, but not by me.  C'mon, I'm not alone in this; stand up, some of you out there know exactly what I'm talking about.  Is Carrie a triumph or a tragedy indeed?

Lest I sound like I'm coming down hard on this film, let me make myself clear; Carrie is a fine movie that should be seen by just about anybody into horror, into DePalma, King, high school movies, or even if you just wanna see Nancy Allen naked.  You might say it's morally ambiguous, which is okay by me; some movies end up this way because its makers didn't think though the situations they'd crafted, but I'm fairly confident that neither King nor DePalma were unconscious of the fist-pumping "go get 'em" part of us roused by this story's climax.

Carrie somehow managed to avoid getting a sequel for 23 years (breaking the record Psycho held by a year) , which would've been a near total waste if it weren't for a such a good (and smartly un-Carrie-like) lead role.  Even Amy Irving came back, not that you'd notice.  Carrie isn't quite the classic it's often hailed as, but it's good enough that I'm still surprised that it took so long for the rights-holders to come back to the trough.  I just wish I saw the Broadway musical!

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