Low budget magnificence

Rating: 8/10 (31 January 2005)

Sissy, pole-vaulting into immortality by playing the avenging angel of all oppressed and abused teenagers. Holding up as a camp classic for 25 years, as well as being referenced and spoofed in dozens of other films, *Carrie* is a spectacular production that radically upped the ante for future teen-scream horror fests. As the socially-retarded, but secretly powerful Carrie White, Spacek plays her character with a sincerity that is heartbreaking. When, as part of a vengeful joke, she is elected Prom Queen, and is doused with a bucket of pig's blood, her powers of telekinesis go wild, and everybody pays. DePalma takes us on a wild visual ride, with spectacular cinematography - an opening sequence of the girls' locker room is as dreamy and erotic as odalisque painting by Ingres, but it quickly devolves to one of the most distressingly graphic and disturbingly camp scenes in all filmdom  that of the menstruating Carrie on the floor of the shower being pelted with Kotexes by her classmates screaming, "Plug it up! Plug it up!" The scene is only the first of many ugly surprises DePalma has up his sleeve.
It is Sissy's stock-in-trade to play a character who has deep respect for, yet rebels against, her upbringing - often that of ignorant (but never stupid) white-trash from a bad gene-pool. In most films, she ultimately rises above her milieu and proves that a good heart will conquer all. *Carrie* is no exception, even though Sissy's character does not survive this one. It is the physical change from the impossibly-freckled, socially-retarded waif into the vision of 70s loveliness that enters into many of Sissy's portrayals, and Sissy expresses these changes in such a way to make the viewer look forward to them. She does not disappoint. Many aspects of the film have entered into the lexicon of film  the famous bucket of blood falling in slow motion sets off the ugly chain of events culminating in mayhem that has seldom been portrayed more shatteringly than the conflagration at the prom. The split-screen recording of the bloodbath at the end, cutting away all sound except for the dripping of blood, is magnificent. As quotable as *Valley Of The Dolls* and *All About Eve* ("I should have killed myself after the first time he put it in me." "I might have known it would be red." "I can see your dirty pillows." "Take off the dress, we'll burn it together and pray for forgiveness."), *Carrie* will live and die  forever.