A loose adaptation

Rating: 7/10 (8 September 2013)

Carrie was Stephen King's first novel and easily considered one of his best. When it became a hit a film adaptation was practically inevitable. Carrie is considered one of the most important horror films of the 70s.
Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) is an isolated high school student with no friends and a fundamentalist Christian mum, Margaret (Piper Laurie). After being humiliated when she gets her first period in the school shower her telekinetic powers start to develop and heighten when under stress. Sue Snell (Amy Irving) feels guilty due to the incident in the shower where she joined in with mob and wants to make it up to Carrie by getting her boyfriend, Tommy (William Katt) to take Carrie to the prom. But the lead bully, Chris Hargensen (Nancy Allen) wants revenge against Carrie, blaming her for not letting her go to the prom and with her delinquent boyfriend, Billy (John Travolta) plan to humiliate Carrie in the most public and sadistic way possible.
Carrie is an excellent novel, a short, taut little affair that is a breeze of a read. Some of the elements from the novel would have been hard to translate into because of the structure of the novel: mainly the extracts from the White Commission, The Shadow Exploded and Sue Snell's diary. Other scenes were cut because of expense, i.e. the explosion of the petrol station. But this is an adaptation that does make some big changes and cuts from the novel. Some include not getting to see Chris' father threatening to sue and ends up seeing what his daughter really is, cutting out Sue's pregnancy to small things like Carrie saying her father left her mother instead of dying in an industrial accident. Plus the sociological elements were cut out, looking at the impact of the aftermath of the Carrie incident which I thought was some of the most interesting stuff in the novel.
The big positive with the film is the casting of Spacek: she was a terrific as Carrie, having the right look for seemingly being a little weird but have a unique beauty when she is at the prom. She was able to convey the shy, awkwardness of a character who is beaten emotionally at home and at school and shows a psychopathic rage with the look with her eyes when the pigs blood fell on her. The rest of the cast were solid, like Allen playing the bitchy, self-centred bully, Travolta as the abusive boyfriend, Katt and Irving as the high school students who want to do the right thing. Betty Buckley was excellent as the friendly teacher who wants to support and protect Carrie and Laurie did a good job as Carrie's fundamentalist mother. But Sydney Lassick was really hammy and out of place as an English teacher who wasn't even in the book.
The big highlight of the film was the prom scene when the pig's blood felt on Carrie goes into a psychopathic rage, locking the doors with her mind and sets out killing everyone. Director Brian De Palma was able highlight the build-up and the tension and then the terror of Carrie's killing. De Palma was able to make the sequence with a unique style using split screens to show different actions happening at the same time and De Palma used silences, making us lip-read what people are saying (though it is very obvious). It is excellent sequence.
During the film they are plenty of musical cues when Carrie using her powers, partly due to the limits of special effects, but sometimes the violin streaks from Psycho which was a distraction.
Carrie is a very well-acted film that had some stand out sequences and excellent acting, but it is too loose of an adaptation for me.