Old before its time?

Rating: 6/10 (19 July 2009)

Stephen King's modern classic about high school bullying with a little dark supernatural sprinkled in of course.
It is over 30 years old, but it watches much older mainly because DePalma is as usual trying way too hard to homage/imitate someone else's direction style while at the same time putting way too indelible of a 70s dorkism stamp on the texture. Much about the pop culture of the 70s is rather non-nostalgic and cringing camp, and a film like this one so completely bathed in the decade's cheap cologne, very justifiably suffers. Carrie has some effective horror scenes, maybe even a couple iconic ones, but these are too often followed by wandering Film School exercises that leave you scratching your head as to the whereabouts of an editor. The background score is soap opera grade and distracting. The performances are very good and the casting of the hate-ables is spot on. PJ Soles and the chubby obnoxious guy from Miami Vice shine as the hard to look at, too cool for school loathsome antagonists. Yet as with virtually all King works, the book is more satisfying than the film for lots of reasons. You lump all of these many negatives together, and the result is a film that really can no longer be watched in its entirety and survives only for about 15 minutes of its effective and disturbing horror imagery, which Im sure you could just you-tube and spare yourself a wasted evening.