Carrie makes up for its excesses with a smart script

Rating: 8/10 (11 November 2013)

Teen horror is a minefield of a genre, and all too often strays into exploitation, silly casting, and heavyhandedness. "Carrie" isn't above such criticism, but at least it compensates for its missteps. After getting off on the wrong foot with an egregious locker room scene, director Brian de Palma reins it in and puts together one of the best Stephen King film adaptations. The fact that some of the male actors look like they're in their 30s, or that John Travolta's accent is not of this world, hardly matters because the script is so intelligent and the story so easy to get wrapped up in. The mother's religious ramblings don't sound like run-of-the-mill gibberish, but rather seem to hint at specific personal demons and to spring from the head of a real character who contains multitudes and contradictions. This is true also of the film's other adult lead, Carrie's gym teacher and mentor. She has a good read on the alpha girl bullies, the hangers-on, and the outcasts in her class, but this savviness doesn't make her immune to the occasional and serious miscalculation. In a great scene in which she interrogates a girlfriend and boyfriend she suspects of pulling a prank, her zeal to protect Carrie blinds her to the little clues that we pick up on: the girl is trying to do the right thing but doesn't know how to express this clearly to the adult, and the boy is vain and flip but clearly not the type to plan a complicated revenge. The film's many plot threads and idiosyncratic characters pay off in a big way with the famous climax, but the movie has a hard time settling on an ending after that and tosses in some needless "I see what you did there" shots that, if nothing else, provide a bookend to the excessive opening.