Queen Bees, Wannabes and Carrie...

Rating: 10/10 (10 January 2004)

Nowadays, we have literal truck loads of books on how to deal with our tormented teenage daughters. We all know in this day and age that teenage girls are wicked bullies and the damage inflicted by their relentless bullying is often irreparable. But you don't need those books. Most of us who have watched the film "Carrie" already know the devastating effect that merciless torment can have upon us. That's why we watched the film - to see those bullies get what they deserve and to cheer Carrie on every step of the way.
Carrie is an abused teenager with a void where her self-esteem should be. Her mother is a whacko religious nut who likes to violently throw Carrie around for imagined sins and lock her in the closet for days on end. Her schoolmates are spoiled rotten Clique Queens, who enjoy attacking anyone less popular than they are, for no reason at all other than that it amuses them. Carrie becomes their main target when her period - incredibly late - finally arrives one day in the locker room shower. Carrie, who has never been sexually educated and is under the impression that she is bleeding to death, freaks out. Of course, her classmates find this terribly amusing.
With her the onset of her menstrual cycle, her dormant powers of telekinesis suddenly wake and cannot be controlled anymore than her newly awakened raging hormones can be. Unfortunately, no one is aware of this. As Carrie dares to stand up to her mother and begins to break out of her shell, her cruel and sadistic classmates have a plan to keep her in her place forever. Too bad they don't know how dangerous all that suppressed anger can be. Carrie gets her revenge on them all and the climax of the film is a bloody, fiery apocalypse, as Carrie unleashes her pent up anger along with her powers and literally lets them run their ferocious course.
Carrie is not so much a horror film as it is a psychological one. The human mind is capable of horrors that no movie camera or special effects crew can reproduce, and the abused psyche is a monster that no one wants to see unleashed. It features great performances by Sissy Spacek as the severely damaged Carrie, Piper Laurie as her delusional mother, Amy Irving as the one teenage girl with a streak of compassion and guilt and Nancy Allen as every nerds nightmare - the Popular Girl with no morals, no feelings and no mercy.
For having been written by a man (Stephen Kings first novel) this is a powerful portrait of what it is like to be a teenage girl...and an outcast one at that. The hope, the anger and frustration, all are strong and realistically portrayed. This is a film about the monster within us all.