"Hey, you're beautiful."

Rating: 7/10 (6 August 2018)

In the annals of dirty deeds, what Chris Hargensen (Nancy Allen) did to Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) was one of the most vile, despicable acts anyone could possibly imagine. You have to wonder where that kind of hate and evil come from. That bucket of blood certainly wasn't commensurate to getting detention time for mocking Carrie in the girl's gym locker. Out of everything in the movie, that's the single thing that made the biggest impression on me, simply because it was such a monstrous act that it seemed impossible to come up with.
Young Sissy Spacek did a commendable job as the severely chastised Carrie White. As her mother, Piper Laurie is virtually over the top in the way she demonstrates her religious fervor, to the point of creating a dysfunctional human being in the person of her daughter. The telekinesis angle used by Stephen King in his novel was an intriguing way through which Carrie exacted her revenge against a handful of scheming classmates. Margaret White (Laurie) called it Satan's Power, but we know it better as the power of Stephen King's written word.
Of King's horror novel adaptations, this one stacks up as one of the better ones, owing to Brian De Palma's attentive direction and the effective screenplay by Lawrence Cohen. For it's hour and a half plus run time, it seemed much shorter to me, suggesting that the film had me pretty much focused on the story. The mid-Seventies time frame during which the picture takes place gives it a bit of a dated quality, what with the clothing and hair styles, but King's horror never seems to go out of fashion.